Harry Potter and the Muggleborn Chaser
by transportation
Summary: Katie Bell's fifth year should have been simple, without even Quidditch to distract her from OWL exams. But an unexpected romance brings the Tri-Wizard Tournament close to home, and pulls her into the ugly side of the magical world.
1. Chapter 1

I don't know why I asked him, really. It was just a quiet morning, the first Saturday after the start of the term. I was up early because I wanted to do some work in the greenhouses. It was my OWL year, and at least at the beginning of the year, I was determined to buckle down and study harder. Herbology's never been my strong suit, and it was silly to hold out hope for anything more than an A on the OWL exam, but there I was, eating breakfast as early as I ever had at Hogwarts. I was glad that Quidditch was cancelled that year—well, not glad, but I thought it would be good for me. There were half a dozen Ravenclaws, a pair of Hufflepuffs, and me, scattered through the Great Hall, so I noticed right away when Harry came in.

And like I said, I don't know why I asked him. We'd been teammates for three years by then, of course, and you might have called us friends, but we weren't really close. Maybe I was less affected by the mystique of Harry Potter than most people, because I'd suffered with him through Oliver's insane practices, and trudged back to the castle, wet, muddy, and exhausted, with him and the rest of the team. I'd even gotten to see him come out of his shell a little. He was a skinny little kid his first year on the team, and I remember the way he choked down his breakfast that morning before the first game. Not that I was in much better shape; it was my first game, too. By his third year, though, he carried himself differently on game day—like for once, he didn't mind all the attention that came with being Harry Potter, as long as it was Quidditch that people were watching him for.

But I'd also caught sight of his face twice during the Welcoming Feast. The first time was when Dumbledore had announced that Quidditch was cancelled for the year, and he looked as outraged as anyone. But the second time was when Dumbledore had spelled out the details of the Tri-Wizard Tournament, and just for a second, he had this look of relief on his face, like he was thrilled that there was going to be this big to-do at Hogwarts, and he was going to have nothing to do with it. And I felt like I had a little glimpse into what it cost Harry to be the Boy-Who-Lived, right then. I'd thought about the expression on his face a couple of times since then—turned it over in my head when I should have been working on Transfiguration or something.

We may not have been close friends, but when he saw me at the Gryffindor table that morning, he steered himself over and sat across from me, and even mumbled, "Good morning," at the table between us. That could have been it—a companionable but silent breakfast—and maybe it would have been any other day.

But I leaned over towards him a little bit, and asked, "Are you going to miss it?" He looked up at me, puzzled. "Quidditch," I clarified. What else would I have been talking to him about? "Are you going to miss it?"

He shrugged, and swallowed his toast. "I reckon, yeah," he finally said. "It's hard to say I'll miss Oliver's practices. But I'll miss the rest, you know. Parties in the common room. And even just being on my broom." He looked down, then, like he was done talking, then looked up sheepishly. "What about you?" he asked.

"The same, pretty much," I told him. "It's OWLs for me this year, so I need all the extra study time I can get. But here I am at seven o'clock in the morning, and honestly I'd rather spend the next four hours flying drills for Oliver than up to my elbows in dragon manure." That got a laugh out of him, small but genuine, so I asked him. "Want to go for a fly sometime?"

He didn't answer right away, and I was ready to think all sorts of unkind things about him (and myself, too), but then he looked at me again with those eyes he has, and said, "Yeah, that'd be great." He seemed to realize then that he'd taken too long to answer, and he said, "Sorry, I—," but then he couldn't figure out how to explain himself. So he just said, "That'd be great," again. We didn't really say anything through the rest of breakfast. It was a comfortable silence, I'd like to think.

I'd started first, so I finished first. When I stood up, I said, "Let me know." And I got eye contact—those eyes again—and a nod, and something I'm seventy-five percent sure was a smile. That's probably more than most people get from Harry in a year. So even though I was pretty sure we'd never actually go flying, I was in a good mood until I got to the greenhouse.

* * *

We did go flying, though, the very next weekend. It was Sunday, this time, and I was in the common room, along with most of the rest of Gryffindor. The noise was not doing wonders for my resolve to be more studious, and I remembered with some sympathy the short fuses that Alicia and Angelina had had the previous year. A good part of the noise was coming from Harry, Ron, and Hermione's table. Ron and Hermione had been sniping at each other all year—house elves and table manners seemed to be their favorite subjects—and Harry was finding himself in the middle an awful lot. But I guess he'd had enough at that particular moment, so he got up and walked over to me. Ron and Hermione didn't even notice when he left.

"Katie," he said, maybe a little more publicly than the situation called for. "How about that fly?" Now they had noticed, and they were looking at me with astonishment (Ron) and suspicion (Hermione). I wasn't sure why he was asking me quite that way, but I was tired of being in that common room too. So I flipped my book closed, planted an elbow in Alicia's ribcage (just in case she was thinking about inviting herself along), and followed him out through the portrait hole.

Flying with Harry was always glorious, but it was especially fine on a crisp autumn morning when he'd gone out of his way to invite me in front of the whole common room. Once we got in the air, he started showing off for me a little bit, but that was all right. First, because I was an appreciative audience—I knew exactly what it took to make a broomstick do what he was doing, so I could be properly impressed. But second, because I was pretty good on a broomstick myself, and if he was showing off, that meant I could too.

After a while, though, we got tired of flying tight spirals up the goalposts, and making inverted passes over the stands, and we just started taking long lazy loops over the pitch, flying next to each other. At first we were going too fast to talk, but we slowed down, and I had the first really long conversation with Harry that I'd ever had.

"How'd you wind up on the team?" was the first thing he wanted to know. It was a reasonable question. Everybody knew the story of how he got on the team—or everybody knew a story, anyways. The only ones who saw it were the Gryffindor and Slytherin firsties, and they may have been a little bit prone to exaggeration. But I was just a little second-year chit of a girl at the time, and it was a little surprising for me to be on the team.

"Well, I always loved sports in primary school. I played pretty much everything—hockey, athletics, netball, I even played football with the boys my last year," I told him. But he had made this little sideways sliding motion on his broom, to bring himself almost to a stop in the air.

"Are you—did you grow up Muggle?" he asked.

I was surprised, and at first maybe a little offended, and so my tone of voice may not have been entirely polite. "Muggleborn. Didn't you know?" I said.

He turned red, and looked down at the ground for a moment. "I'm sorry," he said finally. "You know I didn't mean it like it sounded. I just had no idea."

Well, when I stopped and thought about it, I had to appreciate his point of view, and I was quick to say so. "It's OK, Harry," I said. "Actually it's kind of refreshing. Sometimes I feel like my blood status is part of every conversation I have here. It's nice to talk to someone who doesn't even keep track."

He nodded right away. "I know what you mean," he said. "I mean, if you take someone like Neville, I'm sure he could tell you about everybody in our year. For the purebloods, he'd know their parents, and all their various family ties and alliances; for the half-bloods, he'd know about the scandal when their parents got married, or their grandparents or whoever; and for the Muggleborns, he'd know they're Muggleborn, and that's all he'd really need to know. And Neville's a good bloke, he wouldn't judge us, but there are some who aren't so nice about it."

I was so quick to agree, I didn't even notice the way he'd said 'us'. Not right away, anyway; I thought about it plenty later on. Right then, I just said, "Exactly. And so any conversation about anybody at Hogwarts, we're starting at a big disadvantage."

He knew what I was talking about. "It's just stupid, though. Why should it be such a disadvantage? I don't hate Malfoy because he's a pureblood. I hate him because he's an awful git. Why should he hate me for who my parents were?"

So we talked about that for a while, before we circled back to the question of how I started playing Quidditch. It wasn't much of a story; my first year had been kind of a low point for Gryffindor Quidditch. They didn't win a match, and there were lots of broken bones, particularly in the Slytherin game. So when tryouts rolled around my second year, nobody was really interested in getting publicly humiliated three times a year, and there was a spot on the team for the little sports-mad Muggleborn girl. And Oliver, bless his heart, never once made a big deal of it.

I told Harry all this, and he nodded like Dumbledore, rubbed his chin, and said, "I see. It must have been all the hockey that prepared you to be such a talented young Chaser."

I was in such a hurry to correct him that I didn't really see the compliment he'd buried in there. "I think it was the netball, really, that's where I got used to throwing—," I said, and then I realized he was making fun of me. Or making a joke, anyways; he wasn't being mean. So I dove at him, and he dodged right away, so I made a little half-spiral and tried to cut him off from in front, but that didn't work at all; he was too quick on that Firebolt of his. But we ended up playing broom tag for a long time after that. By the time we went inside, we'd missed lunch, and we were both in serious need of a shower. I had quite the interrogation coming from Alicia and Angelina, and from Leanne, too, when she found out about it. Harry probably got the same from Ron and Hermione, but they'd apparently learned their lesson about shouting at him in the common room, so I didn't hear what they had to say to him.

* * *

We only went flying one more time before everything changed. It was one of those misty October mornings in Scotland when all the sane people stay inside and drink tea. But we'd been hardened by years of Oliver Wood, and our housemates were still driving us crazy, so we set off despite the weather. We made a pretty good try at getting some flying in, but it wasn't any fun. It was cold, and the mist was thick enough that I couldn't properly admire Harry's flying skills. We gave it up as a bad job after maybe twenty minutes, but neither of us could stand the idea of the common room (and, I admit, the library didn't even occur to me), so we sat down on the very top row of the stands to talk. I showed him a warming charm, which he mastered with annoying speed.

It seemed like maybe his friendship with Ron and Hermione was a little shaky right then, and I hated to see that happen. So I started talking about them. "I always envied your friendship with Ron and Hermione a little," is what I said, and he looked surprised, if not actually cross. "It was hard for me to find my way at Hogwarts to start out. Leanne was really my only friend, and she was Muggleborn, too. We stuck together as best we could, but with her in Hufflepuff, it was hard. None of the Gryffindors who had grown up witches went out of their way to help me or anything."

He frowned at that. "What about Angelina and Alicia?" he asked.

"Oh, sure, once I was on the team they were nice to me. But my first year, they were on the team, and I wasn't, plus Fred and George were on the team too, so they never even thought about the firsties. It was my second year that they sort of took me under their wing. Or wings. And by the time it occurred to me that somebody ought to do the same for you, you and Ron and Hermione were together all the time."

"Oh, so you just wanted me under your wing?" he said. He was teasing me, but it sounded like I might have struck a nerve, too. "What about Dean Thomas? He needed more help than I did."

"No, he didn't. He fit right in with Seamus and Lavender and then Parvati later on," I told him. And then I realized that I was admitting to paying a lot of attention to his whole year group, but Harry didn't even notice.

"Ron and Hermione are great," he said, staring at the mist. "I guess you've heard we've been through a lot together. But I don't know what's going on this year. Hermione's just so motivated, and Ron's really not, and I'm somewhere in the middle, and we're always driving each other mad."

I really wanted to help him out. "Harry, I don't know what happened exactly, but you all went through something big at the end of last year, with Professor Lupin and Sirius Black."

"And Buckbeak," he interrupted. I must have looked confused, because he reminded me, "The hippogriff." That didn't help much, but he looked away. "I shouldn't really talk about it," he said.

"It's OK," I said. "The point is, something big happened to all three of you, and then you didn't see each other for the whole summer. Now you're back together, but nothing big is happening. It's just school. Maybe you're just having a hard time adjusting."

He thought about that for a little while. "Are they really my friends, then? If I can only stand to be around them when something big is happening?"

"Harry!" I said. Or maybe I shouted; I was shocked at him, and I showed it. "Do you know how lucky you are to have friends you can count on? I don't know the details, but it doesn't matter much. They've stood by you through things that the rest of us can only whisper about. How can you even ask me that?"

He didn't seem to mind that I was shouting at him. Actually, he smiled at me, a real smile. "Thanks, Katie," he said, and I can't stand to think what a dumb look I must have had on my face when he said it. "I guess I needed to hear that. I'll remember what you said next time I'm talking to them." He saw the look on my face, and sort of waved his hand. "Oh, they're still driving me mad. But we'll get over it."

I had to take a deep breath before I could say anything. "All right. I'm sorry, maybe that was none of my business. Only I would hate to see a friendship like that come apart over nothing."

"Don't worry about it. I asked you, after all."

"All right," I said again, and then I had to take another deep breath. "You know, Harry, you've got other friends, too."

I was ready to explain that I was talking about Neville, or some Ravenclaw or something, but he just looked at me and said, "I know." And then we didn't really have to say anything else for a while.

* * *

I started noticing Harry a little more after that. At first I was just paying attention to him when he was around Ron and Hermione, trying to judge whether that volcano was going to erupt. It looked like maybe it wasn't going to right away. At least, Harry seemed a lot more relaxed around them. Hermione was wound as tight as ever, and Ron, well, I've never been able to see the sweet kid with a good heart that's supposed to be hiding in there. But you'd see them starting to wind each other up, and Hermione's voice would start to carry across the common room, and Ron's face would go all red and gold like a house banner, but Harry would just lean back and sort of smile. It almost looked like he was going to wrap his arms around them both. It probably just made them madder.

But I never really saw him look that happy when he was away from them. He didn't seem to have any friends in other houses, and even the rest of Gryffindor passed him by. Ginny was hanging out in his wake a lot, but he was never more than pleasant to her. Neville—now there's a kid who could have used a friend like Harry, but their paths just didn't cross that much. I started to make a point of saying hello to Harry, and he was always so sincere and almost grateful when he said hello back, but he didn't exactly come to me for help with Transfiguration. Which was probably just as well; there's not much I could have done to help him.

And then came that awful Halloween. I was so excited about the tournament at first; it really seemed like the whole world was coming to Hogwarts, and after everything I'd heard about the Quidditch World Cup, we needed something big to go well. Angelina, of course, had been talking about it non-stop since she first realized she was eligible, and Alicia and I got swept up, too. She seemed to think she had a pretty good chance, and maybe she did. Thinking back on it, we were so hopelessly naïve. It didn't even occur to us that the tournament would be difficult, let alone dangerous.

It was all very dramatic and magical at first. I mean, of course it was magical, but it was magical in the way all the best things at Hogwarts were. We had the big feast, and then Dumbledore stood up, all majestic and mysterious, and brought out that flaming goblet. It was enormous; not even Professor Hagrid could have drunk from it. Dumbledore waved his hand over it, and the flames leapt to meet him, and deposited a slip of paper in his hand. But before he could even read the name, a red bolt shot out of the goblet. I thought it was flame for a moment, but then I realized that it was pure magic. It went straight across to the Slytherin table and hit Viktor Krum, the famous Quidditch player. It played across him for a second or two, and he sat up a little straighter, but it didn't seem to hurt or anything. Then it disappeared, and the flames in the goblet died down, and Dumbledore waved his arm. "The Champion for Durmstrang," he said grandly, "is Viktor Krum!" The Durmstrang students banged on the tables and shouted, and everybody else applauded. Krum walked up to Dumbledore, acknowledged everyone with a wave, and then disappeared into some side room.

The flames rose again, and we all held our breath. Dumbledore reached out for the slip, but everyone was watching for the bolt of magic. This time it flew toward the Ravenclaw table and hit this impossibly beautiful French witch. She did the same thing as Krum, although her posture was a lot better, so she couldn't really sit up any straighter. But she sort of flinched, and then Dumbledore announced her as Fleur Delacour, Beauxbatons champion, and she walked up to the front of the room.

Hogwarts was the only school left when the flames sprang to life again. There were a lot of people around the Great Hall who were dreaming of being chosen. Angelina was gripping the back of my chair, and I had my fingers crossed for her. But the red bolt went over towards Hufflepuff instead, and hit Cedric Diggory. We clapped for him—Cedric was a decent sort, after all—but Angelina was sagging next to me. As soon as he left the room, I turned to her. At first I was just trying to console her, but then I had to shield her from all the other girls in Gryffindor, who were swooning over the boy who had just shattered her dreams.

So I didn't see the goblet light up again. But I sure saw the bolt of magic zip past me, and I turned almost involuntarily to see that it had landed on Harry Potter. There was confusion all around, especially when the bolt didn't vanish after a second or two like it had with the other champions. But from the expression on his face, Harry was clearly fighting it. The arc of magic between the goblet and him shimmered and crackled for fifteen or twenty unbearable seconds. Then his eyes went very wide, and the stream of magic got much wider. He clutched at the table and looked totally overwhelmed, like a man pinned down by a firehose. But the goblet didn't stop; it just poured more and more magic into him. When it finally ended, maybe another thirty seconds later, Harry just leaned on the table panting.

"Harry Potter," Dumbledore announced, and he sounded completely dumbfounded. I looked up at him; he was reading another slip of paper, and the goblet had gone out. "Harry Potter," he said again, but he still didn't sound like he believed it. I looked at Harry. He showed no sign of getting up until Hermione yanked on his arm. Then he walked to the front of the room like a condemned man.

* * *

The common room that night was tense. Harry came in late, announcing to whoever was around, "I didn't enter my name, but I have to compete." Some people wanted to celebrate that he was a champion. But Angelina was hurting pretty badly, and I suppose some of the seventh years were nursing their own dashed hopes, and nobody wanted to hurt their feelings. Especially not Angelina's; her tongue gets sharp when she's angry. It might have helped if Harry had said something more, but it might not have, and he didn't look like he was in any shape to talk.

He sat in the corner of the common room with his back to the rest of us. Hermione was with him, but not Ron, which I wondered about a little. They didn't seem to be saying much. Fred and George paid him a visit, and I could see his mood lift right away. But just as quickly, he got defensive, and then upset. Fred and George walked away laughing, but Harry just shrank back into himself.

So I exchanged a tricky bit of non-verbal communication with Alicia, in which I told her that I was going to talk to Harry and she should keep Angelina distracted, using only my eyebrows and the muscles in my right cheek. If I have ever said anything unkind about Alicia, I take it back, because she understood and did what I asked without even smirking at me

I walked up behind Harry and put my hand on his shoulder. He just about jumped out of his skin, and I think Hermione was going for her wand, but he settled down when he saw it was me. "It'll be OK, Harry," I said quietly.

He relaxed under my hand for a second. "Don't see how," he said.

I didn't either, but I couldn't tell him that. So I just said it again, "It'll be OK," and then I left him alone.

* * *

It should have gotten a little better for Harry, at least in Gryffindor, after that. Angelina figured out pretty quickly that he wasn't trying to steal her thunder. It helped that she knew him from Quidditch, I think, but there was also some whispered communication somehow. It must have been Hermione, because Ron wasn't talking to Harry. And that's why, even though the rest of the house felt a little sheepish about the way we'd treated him, it didn't really change things for him. When Ron had called him a liar, he'd just decided to shut the rest of Hogwarts out. He sat in the corner with Hermione, trying to learn all the magic in the world, and didn't hear anything that anyone else said to him. He tolerated me reasonably well when I talked to him, but I was worried about distracting him. So I just sat with Alicia and Angelina and watched him.

In a way, the horrible article that Skeeter wrote probably made things easier. It just solidified in his head that it was him and Hermione against the world. Everybody in Gryffindor knew it was rubbish, of course. But the rest of the school was happy to chatter about it, either because they hated Harry, or because they wanted to knock him off his game in favor of Cedric. Things were even a little strained between Leanne and me, although if she ever wore one of those buttons, she didn't do it in front of me. I couldn't believe that some people did, though; I was surprised to see that Hufflepuff house pride had a dark side.

Then one Monday morning he stopped behind me while I was eating breakfast. "Katie," he said, "I need your help." He sounded desperate.

Angelina said something like, "Are you bothering my Chaser, Potter?" which she probably meant as a joke, but came out sounding pretty hostile.

But Harry didn't even acknowledge her. He just said, "Katie?" again.

I turned around and said, "Of course. What do you need?"

"I need some practice flying. Can you come out between the last class and dinner?"

"Of course," I said again. And he thanked me, and went and sat at the other end of the table. I waited until he was gone to start glaring at Angelina. I don't know what made her think I was _her_ Chaser; Alicia could have been captain just as easily.

When I saw him that afternoon, he was a wreck. I asked him why he needed to practice flying, fully aware that the tournament started the next day, but I wasn't prepared for what he was going to say. "Dragons," he said. "The first task is dragons. I can't win a fight with one, but I might be able to out-fly it." He didn't look like he believed it.

"All right," I said, determined not to panic in front of him. "Dodging and maneuverability drills, then. Should we borrow a Bludger?"

"No," he said. "I can't risk getting hurt." Good point. That could wait for tomorrow.

So we flew for a little while, but all we proved was that he was quicker on a broomstick than I was. I tried shooting coloring charms at him with my wand, but it was just about impossible to hit a moving target, and they weren't really big enough for him to see. What he really needed was practice dodging a wall of flame, and maybe some idea of how fast a dragon could climb and turn, but neither of us knew anything about that.

I stopped to catch my breath, and he pulled up alongside me. "Harry, you're a natural on a broom," I told him. "If there's anything else you need to work on, you should do that instead."

"OK," he said, and I could hear the exhaustion in his voice. "I'll go in and work on the summoning charm."

"What for?" I asked.

"Well, I'm not allowed to start with my broomstick, so I figure I'll summon it."

My stomach dropped. "Sounds good, Harry," I said, and I don't think he heard the quaver in my voice. "What's plan B?"

He pointed his wand out over the lake, and said, "Stupefy, stupefy, stupefy, stupefy, stupefy, stupefy, stupefy, stupefy, stupefy." The stunners flew harmlessly over the water, and he slumped over his broom. I didn't dare say a word, but I grabbed his elbow. After a minute, he sat back up. "I can get nine stunners off before my vision starts to go funny," he said. "It's supposed to take twenty dragon handlers to stun a dragon. Plan B is to hope my stunners are twice as powerful as average, or that they all hit the dragon in the eye." He looked at me for a minute, measuring me somehow, and then confessed, "It's not completely impossible. I've been feeling a lot more powerful lately."

We landed, and he left to go work with Hermione. When I was sure nobody was around, I pointed my wand towards the far shore. "Stupefy, stupefy, stupefy, stupefy, stupefy, stupefy," I said, and then I found myself on my knees, my head buzzing. I thought for a minute that I'd been hit with my own rebounding stunner, but I realized it must be magical exhaustion. I staggered back to the castle on my own, feeling foolish, and terrified for Harry.

* * *

I learned a lot that next day, even though classes were cancelled for the tournament. I sat with Alicia and Angelina, since Leanne was still being difficult about Cedric. Ron and Hermione were a couple of rows in front of us. It was cool and sunny, with a nice stiff breeze. The elite of British magical society, and probably continental magical society as well, were in the announcer's box, or scattered through the stands. And the spectacle we were all there to see was totally and completely insane.

Maybe the girls who grew up witches were better prepared for this. Maybe they all see dragons in magical petting zoos from the time they're four years old. But my first view of a dragon was on the Hogwarts Quidditch pitch that morning. They're enormous, of course, but it's not only the size that gets you. It's the feeling that you're completely insignificant next to one, that there's absolutely nothing you can do to escape it. It must be the way a field mouse feels when the shadow of a hawk passes over it.

They're supposed to be quite clever, but this one just looked like a caged animal. It was furious, and there's no doubt in my mind that it would have killed everyone in the stands without a second thought, just to be left alone. And of course it was protecting its eggs, so it was probably ready to fight to the death.

And there were four kids getting ready to face this thing, for the amusement of everybody in the stands. (I know, I know, three of them were "of age" in the magical world, but they were still just teenagers. And I don't even know what it means to be "of age"; I don't get the sense that Angelina got to vote for her Member of Wizengamot or anything, and we'd all been drinking Butterbeer since we were thirteen.) It was sick and wrong, and I couldn't stand it. That idiot Bagman was announcing it like a bloody football match, but it was life and death for the competitors. I was appalled, I was terrified, and I was shaking in my seat. When Cedric emerged, I wanted to look away, but you can't actually take your eyes off a dragon when it's in front of you. Plus it would have been disrespectful to Cedric.

I watched the first three competitors in a kind of daze. I was hunched over and my eyes were blurry, and I kept praying under my breath, _please be okay, please be okay_. Alicia and Angelina seemed to be in slightly better shape; at least, Alicia had the presence of mind to rub my back between competitors. But the student sections of the stands were a lot more subdued than anyone would have expected.

The first thing I learned that day, then, was that the wizarding world was crazy and immoral. It wasn't enough to send mad gossip columnists after students; no, they had to plunge those same students into a blood sport. Dumbledore's platitudes about international friendship felt like bald lies to me. It planted a seed somewhere deep inside me that said, _I have to get out of here._ Out of those Quidditch stands, out of Hogwarts, probably out of Britain. I wouldn't be safe until I did.

The second thing I learned that day was about the feelings I had for Harry Potter. Maybe everybody else in Hogwarts already knew. Maybe they saw me flying with him, and watching him from across the common room, and they thought, 'Katie's got it bad for that boy.' But all I was thinking was that it had been really nice getting to know Harry better this year. Then I saw him step out of that tent, and I had a whole new feeling to deal with.

I had been afraid for Cedric, and for Krum and Delacour, too. But the kind of anguish that filled my heart when I saw Harry getting ready to face a dragon was something I had never experienced before. I saw him make the wand movement for a summoning charm, and the thought that went through my head as those agonizing seconds passed was, 'He's going to die, and I never told him how wonderful he is.'

If I had been in a daze for the first three competitors, I was in a hyper-aware state for Harry. I realized later that I must have had enough adrenaline in my system to kick a hole in a tank. But all I knew then was that every heartbeat felt like the echo of a faraway cannon blast, and my eyes were switching their focus between Harry and that beast about five times a second. I lived through every twist and turn with him, trying to think with him about where to go next, and watching how the broomstick responded to his mind and body. I honestly believed that if I blinked, he would vanish, and it would be my fault. I probably aged six months in those twenty minutes.

When it was over, I couldn't even cheer. I wanted to go down to that tent and see him (and talk to him and hold him and kiss him and we'd better stop there), but I was in a heap in my seat, and I didn't really have an excuse to visit him. Alicia and Angelina and I walked back to Gryffindor tower together, hardly able to believe what we'd seen.

There was a very strange party in the tower that night, where everybody tried to pretend that Harry hadn't walled himself off from the rest of Gryffindor for the last few weeks. I think we all felt like we'd had a brush with death that day, even though really only Harry had, and the party was about being glad we were alive. Harry gave up on it pretty early, but before he did, he tracked me down and thanked me for helping him practice. I told him honestly that I didn't think I'd helped much. Then I tried to tell him how scared I had been for him, and how glad I was that he was OK, but it was all too raw for me to explain myself clearly.


	2. Chapter 2

I had two new pieces of information to work with after that day. First, I wasn't safe at Hogwarts. And second, I was seriously infatuated with Harry Potter. I didn't know what to do about the first one at all. I couldn't very well write to the Ministry and ask them to transfer my OWL scores to the local comprehensive. And much worse was the thought of the letter I'd have to write to Mum and Dad.

So I spent all my time thinking about the second one. At least I could imagine the happy ending to that, although in moments of cold reality that ending didn't seem too likely. I managed to hold it inside for the rest of the day, but by the next morning I had to tell Alicia and Angelina and Leanne. (After the first task, all of Hogwarts seemed a little shaken, and Leanne and I were back on good terms pretty much right away. I guess the same thing happened to Harry and Ron.) My friends were very kind to me, in that they didn't laugh at me or try to discourage me, but none of them seemed to think that I stood much of a chance.

I hate the idea that you can take the dozens of us in Gryffindor and sum us up with the word 'brave,' but there's at least a little bit of truth to it. And so I did the second-bravest thing I could have done: I went and talked to Hermione Granger. Hermione is somebody else I should have helped more when she got to Hogwarts, and I had always felt ashamed that I hadn't. Harry and Ron had come through for her, and I'd never tried to get close to her after that. She was kind of intimidating, and not for her intelligence, but for what that meant about the rest of her. She loved learning so much, and she was completely loyal to Harry for all those years, and ambitious enough that she wanted to be Head Girl from the moment she got off the train. And despite all that, the Sorting Hat had looked into her eleven-year-old head and decided that the bravery was her most important quality. You had to be a little frightened of that.

I found her in the library, and I made sure nobody was too nearby, and I told her I was falling for her best friend. She didn't even try to pretend I might be talking about Ron. Instead, she said, "I've always wondered why more girls don't seem to fancy Harry."

Immediately I thought I'd made a mistake, and I had no idea how to fix it. "Hermione, if you—do you-?" is all I managed to get out.

She laughed. "No, Harry and I may be very close, but we'll never feel that way about each other." Something in the way she said it, or maybe in the laugh, made me think that she wasn't entirely happy about that, but I wasn't going to ask her about that. Her denial was good enough for me.

But the moment of panic had thrown me off, and all I could think to ask her was, "Well, what do you think?"

She managed not to roll her eyes at me. "For what it's worth, Katie, I think you've been a good friend to him this year, and I think you know him better than almost any girl at Hogwarts. But whether that means Harry likes you, I have no idea." She rubbed at her eyes for a moment, and I realized how exhausted she looked. "If I were him, I'd be more worried about staying alive than finding a girlfriend. Boys are strange creatures, though."

It was the part about staying alive that got my attention. "I can't believe this tournament," I told her. "Can you imagine anything like this in the Muggle world?"

She shook her head sadly. "I read all about it, of course, and there would be stories about how Theodolphus Elphick was killed during the third task in 1544, and I thought I'd gotten myself properly worried about the whole thing. But then I saw that dragon, and little tiny Cedric, and I was just terrified."

"It's not right," I said.

"It's not," she agreed. "I can't believe Dumbledore is letting it happen. Somebody obviously wants to kill Harry, or he wouldn't be in this tournament, and the first task came too close for comfort."

It had never even occurred to me that that was why Harry was in the tournament, but when she said it, it made perfect sense. But we had gotten away from why I wanted to talk to her in the first place. "Is it fair," I asked, "for Harry to go into danger without ever having had a girlfriend?"

She smiled, but it was pretty weak. "That's up to him, and up to you, Katie. I'm not going to talk to him for you." I shook my head to tell her that wasn't what I wanted. "If you make him happy, that would be wonderful. But if you hurt him, or if you distract him from keeping himself safe, I'll—" She buried her head in her hands. "I'm too tired to think of a good threat, but I'll do something terrible to you."

"I don't want to hurt him," I told her. She looked up at me and nodded, and I said goodbye and went back to the tower.

* * *

I spent the next couple of weeks trying to figure out if Harry might like me. Or trying to persuade him that he did. I was not nearly as brave about it as I could have been. Mostly I made sure to stop and say a proper hello every time I saw him, and to occasionally let my hand rest on his elbow for a moment when we were talking. We didn't go flying any more, but I tried not to be discouraged about that. He was always very nice to me, more so than to most anybody else, but I never got any hint as to what he was feeling. I did catch Ginny Weasley glaring at me once or twice, which I chose to take as a good sign.

When the Yule Ball was announced, the whole school went mad. There weren't a lot of really well-established couples in the school, certainly not below sixth year, so almost everybody needed a date. But apparently witches weren't supposed to ask wizards, so all the girls had to chew their nails and hope that the right boy asked them, or try to figure out what to do if the wrong boy did. Nobody wanted to go alone, so the odds seemed to be very much in favor of wizards who were brave enough to ask. But there weren't very many of those, even in Gryffindor.

Fred and George claimed Alicia and Angelina pretty quickly. Maybe it should have stung to be left out, but I didn't really want to go with either of them, or with Lee. Alicia and Angelina had much more tolerance for their particular brand of humor. Bill Campbell (now that he was a fifth-year, we weren't supposed to call him Billy any more) asked Leanne, and she said yes. He wasn't the Hufflepuff of her dreams, but he was nice enough, and she said there was something about his jaw that was quite attractive. Nobody asked me.

I wasn't surprised that nobody asked me, and actually I was kind of grateful. I really wanted to go with Harry, who hadn't shown any sign of asking anybody. Just the fact that nobody had asked me was enough to point out that I couldn't really afford to turn anybody down, if I didn't want to go alone. I guess Quidditch-loving Muggleborn Gryffindors weren't anybody's idea of a dream date. So it was easier if nobody asked me. I thought about asking Harry myself, but I convinced myself to wait.

That first weekend, Harry asked me to go flying, which I readily agreed to. But as we were walking through the castle, he told me that he really just wanted to talk. I admit that there was a wild spark of hope in my heart when he said that, but there was nothing in what he did that made me think he was going to ask me to the Yule Ball. We ducked into the Charms classroom, and he sat down and started fidgeting with his hands.

"Katie, can I ask you for some advice?" he finally asked.

"Of course," I said, even as my heart sank. 'Some advice' was not 'a date to the Yule Ball.'

"I can't ask Ron, because he's gone completely round the twist over this Ball. And I can't ask Hermione, because it would feel like asking my mum. I hope you don't mind."

"I don't mind, Harry." Well, there was a silver lining; at least he didn't think of me like a mother figure.

"There's a girl I want to ask to the Yule Ball."

I waited for him to say something else, maybe explain why there might be something difficult about asking her, but he just looked at me expectantly. "I think you should ask her, then. Uh, is it anybody I know?"

"It's Cho Chang," he said, not looking at me. It's probably good that he wasn't, because I admit that my heart broke when he said that, and it must have showed on my face. But he was staring at his fingers, and I had a moment to recover.

"I'm not sure what you're asking me, Harry," I said. My voice was as steady as a rock. "If you want to ask Cho to the Ball, you should ask her."

"Only I don't know her that well." Sure, go ahead and twist the knife. "And a lot of people believe some pretty awful things about me, and I don't know if she's one of them."

I had a choice here. I could try to talk him out of it, or I could be supportive and try to make him see how wonderful I was. Like many, many stupid girls before me, I chose the second option. "A date to the Yule Ball would be a good way to get to know her better," I said. He looked up at me like the sun was shining out of my forehead. "And nobody really believes anything bad about you."

His eyes dimmed immediately. "No, they do," he said.

"Is Cho one of them?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said, starting to look forlorn again.

"Do you want me to try to find out?" I really didn't want to, but it was the nice thing to offer. Fortunately, he shook his head frantically. "Then you should ask her. If she's mean to you, then you didn't want to go with her anyways." He sat there for a minute, not saying anything. "Is there another problem?" I asked.

He made a face. "I don't know how to ask her. I mean, I know how to ask, but I can't ever find her by herself. She's always with her friend."

I couldn't change course now. "OK, Harry, here's what we'll do. At dinner tonight, we'll sit at the end of the table by the door. When Cho and Marietta leave, I'll ask Marietta a question, and you can have Cho to yourself."

"Really?" Well, clearly he thought I was wonderful. "Thank you, Katie!"

"Don't wimp out on me, Harry. I'm not going to do this twice." He assured me that he wouldn't, and we headed back to the tower.

Great. Now I had to think of something to ask Marietta Bloody Edgecombe. I suddenly had a lot more sympathy for the boys of Hogwarts.

* * *

It went pretty much the way we planned it. Cho and Marietta walked out together, I asked Marietta something completely moronic about Transfiguration, and Harry walked off with Cho. He was remarkably smooth about it. I didn't even have Transfiguration with the Ravenclaws, so Marietta must have known something was up right away, but she did the decent thing and talked to me for long enough to let them escape.

Of course, once she did leave, I had no idea what had happened with Harry and Cho. I hung around the common room that night, but Harry never reappeared. And the Hogwarts rumor mill, usually so reliable, turned up nothing about two rival Seekers.

I found Harry at breakfast the next morning, but Ron and Hermione were with him, so I didn't ask him anything. He made eye contact with me a few times, and then lingered over his porridge, so I poured myself an extra cup of tea. When his friends finally left, I slid over next to him. He poked at his porridge some more. It must have been ice cold by now, so I gathered that things hadn't gone well.

"What's the news, Harry?" I tried to keep my voice upbeat, in case I was wrong.

The pokes turned into stabs. "She said no." I let my shoulders drop, and made a sort of sympathetic grimace. "Well, she said she already had a date. She was nice about it and everything, but I don't think she was wishing I'd asked her first."

"I'm sorry." I was, actually. I mean, I didn't want him to go with Cho, but I didn't want him to be miserable, either.

"It's fine." Stab. Stab.

"Maybe her date will go badly." I said that out loud, but I wanted to take it back right away. Forget her! Too bad, very sad, time to move on!

"It's not just that." Stab. "I need to have a date. McGonagall said so, because I'm a champion. But now I don't know who to ask."

"Harry, you won't have any trouble finding a date. I mean, I'd go with you if you like." What? Why did I say that? I mean, it was true, but now was hardly a good time to say so.

But he turned to me with hope in his eyes. "You would?"

"I would. If you asked me." Apparently I had completely lost control of my mouth. Was I trying to be coquettish? I couldn't even spell it.

He dropped his spoon and swallowed, even though he hadn't taken a bite. "Katie?" His voice trembled a little. "Would you go to the Yule Ball with me?"

"Of course, Harry. I'd be honored." That was the smartest thing I'd said all morning.

"Brilliant," he said, and hit me full force with those eyes. "I don't know how this is supposed to work, so if there's anything I'm supposed to do, just tell me."

"As soon as I find out what it is, I will," I said. We grinned at each other like idiots for a few minutes, and then I came up with some excuse and left.

* * *

I went through the whole day without having a moment alone with any of my friends, and I didn't exactly want to shout my news out to the whole Gryffindor table, so by the time dinner ended, I was about to burst. Even so, I went back to the common room feeling elated and triumphant. Alicia and Angelina were sitting with Fred and George, but I convinced the boys to leave us alone.

I wasn't exactly suppressing my grin as I slid in next to them, and I saw them exchange an amused glance. "Katie?" Alicia said. "Is there something you want to share with us?"

"Oh, nothing big. I do have a date to the Yule Ball, though."

"And who could it be? Is a certain Quidditch teammate of ours planning to take you himself?"

"Why yes, indeed he is." OK, maybe we were being a little silly, but it was better than the kind of shrieking I'd seen some of the other girls do.

"And how is Oliver planning to get back into Hogwarts for the Ball?"

I laughed a little at that. "No, no, you misunderstand," I said. "It's our Seeker who's my date." There was definitely not any shrieking after I said that. Some hugging, and some loud exhortations to tell them everything, but no shrieking.

So I told them everything. And as I did, a strange thing happened. The jubilation vanished off their faces, and they started exchanging glances. When I finished, neither one looked at me for a long time. Finally, Angelina flinched slightly, and said, "Katie, honey, are you sure Harry asked you to the ball as his date?"

"What do you mean?" I asked. I had no idea what she was thinking.

"It just seems like maybe you offered to go with him as a friend, so he didn't have to find a date."

"What?" I was crushed. I didn't think Harry had thought that was what I meant. Until Angelina had said it, I didn't even see how he could have done. But it was true, I hadn't said, 'I'd be your date.' Maybe all I was to him was an easy alternative to a real date.

Alicia took over. "You know Harry would never try to hurt you," she said. I nodded, but my cheeks were starting to feel all funny and stretched out. "Just ask him what he meant. He'll tell you the truth." She sighed, and leaned over towards me. "I'm sorry, Katie. I hope we're just overreacting. We just wouldn't want you to be disappointed."

I told her it was OK, and then I fled.

* * *

I didn't find out about this conversation until much later, but when I went upstairs, Alicia marched directly over to Harry and dragged him off to a corner. From what she told me, she drew her wand, pointed it at his chin, and said, "Harry, what are your intentions towards Katie?"

"What do you mean?" he asked nervously, practically cross-eyed from staring at her wand.

"Exactly what I said. I understand you're taking Katie to the Yule Ball. What are your intentions towards her?"

He looked like he wanted to laugh, but didn't dare. "Is this the overprotective big sister speech I'm getting here? Because I can't really believe you think I'd take advantage of Katie."

Alicia dropped her voice. "I'll use small words. Did you ask Katie to the ball as a friend, or as your date?"

"What?" He looked completely mystified. "Katie is my date to the ball, and she's my friend. Did she change her mind or something?"

"Harry. There's an important difference. Did you ask her to the ball because you want her to be your date, or because you needed a friend to protect you from the scary little third-years who want a piece of your fame?"

He really tried to hide his annoyance, but Alicia saw it anyways. "I asked Katie to the ball because I wanted to go with her. She's my date. Why are you asking me this?"

Alicia sighed and lowered her wand, but didn't put it away. "Harry, maybe I shouldn't tell you this, but Katie really likes you. She really cares about you. I know this is your first Yule Ball and probably your first real date, so I don't want to put too much pressure on you. You don't have to fall in love with her or anything. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. But if you are cruel to her, if you hurt her, I will take you apart and feed the pieces to the Giant Squid. So that's the overprotective big sister speech."

I doubt that threatening Harry was the best way to communicate with him, but he assured her that he wouldn't, and walked back to Hermione and Ron like a man under a Compulsion Charm.

* * *

Like I said, I didn't hear about that conversation until much later, but when Harry figured out how to get me alone the next day, I had the idea that someone had said something. I tried to steel myself for disappointment.

"Katie," he said, not quite looking at me, "I've never done this before, and so maybe I did it wrong. But I wanted to make sure you know that I asked you to the ball as a real date, not just because you're my friend. If that's not what you want, then you don't have to go with me, but I hope it is."

I was so relieved that I felt like laughing, but I realized in time how that would sound to him. So I took his hand, and I said, "I'm really glad you asked me. As a real date."

He gave a little sigh that sounded like maybe it wanted to turn into a laugh, too. But then he looked nervous again. "I really don't know what I'm doing, though. I've never even heard of a Yule Ball before."

"I'm Muggleborn," I reminded him. "I'm not expecting you to know all the wizard ritual dances." His eyes widened when I said that, and it occurred to me later that he probably didn't know how to dance at all. "Listen, there's one Hogsmeade weekend before the ball. Come with me and Leanne and Billy, and between the three of us we'll get you sorted out." We did, too. Good thing Billy was magically raised.

* * *

The Yule Ball itself did not live up to my wildest hopes, or even to my expectations. Maybe it couldn't have; maybe I'd built up my hopes so high that no event taking place on the planet Earth could have met them. But the fact was that it was disappointing.

It started at the head table. Everything before that was very nice; my dress robes fit me just right, and Harry had the right expression on his face when he saw me in them for the first time. He even stumbled a little over his greeting, which did wonderful things for my ego. Thanks to Billy, he had a little corsage for me. When we walked into the Great Hall together, I was feeling as happy as I've ever felt.

But I was still a little insecure over how Harry felt about me, and the company we had at the head table made that feeling a lot worse. There was Cho Chang, the girl he really wanted to go to the Ball with. There was Hermione Granger, his best female friend, who had apparently just turned into a swan. And there was Fleur Delacour, who was a Veela. (I was a little hazy on what exactly a Veela could do, but she was undeniably very attractive.) There was nowhere to turn. I was even glad to see Percy Weasley again, at least until he opened his mouth.

The first dance was nerve-wracking, in a way I hadn't expected. I knew that Harry had a difficult time being in the limelight, especially when he was younger, but I thought he was mostly over it. And I didn't think I would have much trouble at all. It was going to be just like Quidditch, right? But instead, my stomach was all knotted up. It wasn't so much that I was worried about making a fool of myself; I just didn't want all these people watching my first dance with Harry. He didn't look much better, but the way he handled his nerves was to fix his eyes on mine, and keep them there for the whole dance. It was kind of intense. I think we danced reasonably well; my toes didn't hurt at the end.

We danced another dance after that, which was a little easier because everybody else was dancing too, and I had a little bit of a chance to enjoy it. But then we went and sat with Harry's friends, and they weren't much fun. Ron was being an utter pillock, and Parvati looked like she was ready to throttle him. Neville was sitting there like a great lump, and Ginny didn't know what to do with him. Not that I would have known any better at thirteen.

We swapped partners with the other champions for a couple of dances. I guess I should have been thrilled to dance with Krum and Cedric, but I was too worried that Harry was having a better time with their dates than he was with me. Which was pretty unfair to Harry; he was perfectly attentive and in some ways very sweet to me. Cedric even looked like he was going to say something to me after our dance, but he didn't; we didn't know each other at all, really.

And then I dragged Harry over to where Alicia and Angelina and Fred and George were dancing, and we talked to them for a while, but that wasn't really much better. They were just being Fred and George about things, having a good time, but they weren't taking the whole Ball seriously, and I really was. I like Fred and George, especially when Alicia and Angelina are around to remind them which lines they shouldn't cross, but they're not the kind of people I turn to for romantic dreams. At least hanging out with them loosened Harry up.

We found Leanne and Billy, and danced one dance with them. All my gratitude to Billy evaporated when he spent the whole song staring down my robes. I yanked Harry away after that. I wish I'd crushed a couple of Billy's toes while we were dancing, but I didn't think of it until it was too late. I hoped he wasn't treating Leanne that way.

It felt like we'd been dancing for hours, but the Ball showed no sign of slowing down. Rather than taking me back out on the floor, Harry led me over to the refreshments table and got me a glass of punch. Then he said, "Katie, would you like to go for a walk?"

I did want to go for a walk. I was tired of the crowded room, of being stared at by people who didn't know me at all, of my friends and my friends' dates and Harry's friends and their dates. So I took his arm and followed him out the door, and then out of the castle into the courtyard.

"Are you having a good time?" he asked, once we had a little bit of space to ourselves.

"Yes!" I said immediately.

He wasn't fooled at all. "I'm sorry, Katie," he said. "I know I'm rubbish at this. It's just all the people, and I have no idea what's going on with my friends, they've all gone mad, and I have no idea how to have a good time here, so I don't know how to make sure you have a good time." I was about to assure him that it was OK, but he just rushed on. "So I wanted to ask you if we could do this again, only not at the Yule Ball. Have another real date where it's just us."

I can't explain how good it made me feel when he said that. I mean, just the fact that he had noticed that I wasn't having a good time put him ahead of two-thirds of the boys at Hogwarts. And he was right: there was no way we were going to have a good time at this ball, not with the way everybody else was acting. But he'd clearly been making an effort, and he wasn't blaming me for things going badly. So how could I blame him? "Yes," I told him. "Let's do something fun together." And I shifted my arm and took his hand tightly in mine.

We were still holding hands when we walked back into the Great Hall, and I was feeling wonderful again. So, of course, somebody had to try to ruin it. Draco Malfoy and Pansy Parkinson were standing right by the door, and noticed us come in. Draco just looked at me like I was a bug, but Pansy raised that shrill voice of hers and said, "Look, it's Potter and his little Mudblood girlfriend. Did you enjoy your time alone?"

I let go of Harry's hand, took two steps towards her, and snapped, "I'm an inch and a half taller than Harry, and at least three inches taller than you, so watch who you're calling 'little', Parkinson." Then I stomped back to Harry.

It wasn't a great comeback, but at least I hadn't just let her get away with saying that. But then I realized that maybe I wasn't really Harry's girlfriend, and so I should have denied that I was, or let him deny it. And what if he was sensitive about his height? I looked at Harry, but he was biting the inside of his cheek. When we got a few steps further away from them, he covered his mouth with both hands and bent over in silent laughter. "That was brilliant, Katie," he finally got out. I decided right then and there that if he tried to kiss me goodnight, I was going to let him.

The ball was finally winding down. We danced together twice more, and then slowly made our way back to Gryffindor tower, hand in hand again. I worried on the way there about how he might go about kissing me. If we were in different houses, it would have been easier; he could kiss me goodnight in front of the portrait. But if we did that here, we'd have to go through the portrait together afterwards, and that might be awkward. Was he going to kiss me in the common room, in front of the whole house? That didn't seem like something he'd do.

When we got to the portrait, he stopped and looked me in the eye, and then he gave the password and followed me through. Ron and Hermione were having a shouting match right in the middle of the common room. He looked at them, and he looked at me, and he sighed. "Good night, Katie," he said. "I'm looking forward to next time." Then he put his hand on the back of my neck for a moment, like one-tenth of a hug, and he waded into the fray. I didn't stick around to see how it turned out.


	3. Chapter 3

I must have been the worst daughter ever that year. Of course I completely missed Christmas for the Ball, which my parents had accepted without much cheer. And then, when I'd dashed off for the train home the next morning, I'd barely gotten to say goodbye to Harry. There were so many things that I wanted to talk to him about, but all I could do was rattle them around in my head. He was staying at Hogwarts, so I couldn't talk to him on the phone, and there wasn't time for a letter, without an owl of my own. So once I was home, I spent the whole week in my old room, writing letters to Harry, and then deciding that it was dumb to write to him when I really needed to talk to him, and tearing them up. Mum and Dad shared lots of silent looks, but they never really confronted me.

When I got back on the train to Hogwarts, I discovered that I'd been the subject of a Rita Skeeter article. Someone let me read it, and it was really a masterpiece of malicious gossip. It was all about how Hermione and me and Harry and Krum were in some kind of bizarre double love triangle. She contradicted herself all over the place, so if you didn't believe her about one thing (or if you knew better), there was still something else to get you. Hermione was his longtime companion, and I had stolen him away with my wanton ways; Hermione was toying with his affections and playing him off against Krum. Hermione and I were ignorant of magical traditions, and poor innocent Harry needed to be rescued from us; Harry was a half-blood lunatic and all decent pureblooded witches should stay away from him. It was all like that. They even had the Quidditch team picture from my first year on the team, when I was twelve, in the paper.

I didn't really know how to react to the fact that I was now an unwilling celebrity in the magical world. Or not a celebrity, a villain. I found Hermione and talked to her for a little while, but beyond explaining the difference between slander and libel, and how neither applied in the magical world, she didn't really have any practical advice to offer. I had nightmarish visions of going to a professional Quidditch tryout, and having the coach say to me, "I'm sorry, but we're looking for somebody a little less controversial." But I felt even worse for Harry.

By the time the train got to Hogsmeade, I was out of patience. I couldn't sit still in the carriage, and I was the first Gryffindor back to the tower. Harry was sitting alone by the fire, watching the entrance, and he stood up as soon as he saw me. His face was anxious and eager and tentative all at once, and mine must have been similar. I was out of breath, so I didn't say anything at first; I just walked right up to him.

"It's good to see you," he said. I smiled at him, but kept working on getting oxygen into my lungs. "I feel like I should say 'thank you' and 'sorry' all at once," he went on, and I started to object, but he didn't let me say anything. "I saw the article, and I'm sorry that happened to you. I would understand if you didn't want anything to do with me after that, but I hope you don't feel that way."

"Harry," I said, and then I leaned forward and hugged him. He flinched a little and pulled his elbows into his sides. When I didn't pull away, he let out a slow breath, then put one hand in the middle of my back. I stood up straight and put my hands on his shoulders. "It's not your fault," I told him. "I'm not happy about the article, and I hope my parents never see it, but unless you gave her an interview, there's nothing you could have done about it." I shrugged. "I guess it's no worse than what the tabloids say about footballers' girlfriends, though they're not usually fifteen."

He tightened his jaw for a moment, then looked up at me. (I really was a little taller than him.) "Maybe this is a weird thing to say," he said, "but I wanted to thank you for going to the Ball with me. I know it wasn't a great night for you, but I think it would have been much worse for me if I'd gone with anyone else. So, thanks."

"There's nobody else I would have gone with," I told him, and I meant it. But I felt like there was something else he wasn't saying, so I took a guess. "We're still on for Hogsmeade, right?"

It was the right thing to say. He smiled like I'd never really seen him smile before. "Yeah," he said, "I was hoping so." He looked down for a moment, then hit me with those eyes again. "I missed you when you were gone, but I didn't really know what you were thinking. I'm glad—I mean, it's really good to see you."

I thought about kissing him right there, but the common room was filling up, and we were drawing enough attention as it was. Besides, he hadn't exactly welcomed my hug, so maybe I was moving too quickly. Finally, Fred and George made up my mind for me, arriving in the common room and sweeping me up in one of their big productions.

Harry held my eyes as I was getting dragged away, and said "Katie, I—I'll talk to you soon, right?" And he sort of twitched towards me, then stopped, reached out and touched my wrist. When I left, I saw Hermione watching me from a few paces away. She bit her lip, then gave me a small smile. I hoped it was a smile of approval.

* * *

I sat with Alicia and Angelina at dinner, caught between wanting to spend all my time with Harry and not wanting to make a pest of myself. Harry sat with Hermione. I was sort of curious why he wasn't talking to Ron, but they'd spent the week together at Hogwarts, so maybe they were sick of each other.

When the first Howler came, Hermione opened it without even thinking. And it was sort of interesting to find out that there were people who believed so strongly in what Rita Skeeter wrote that they'd send a Howler to a school. There was laughter from the Slytherin table, sure, but it was hard to think that anybody was really taking it seriously. But when more came, for Hermione and for me, Harry started Vanishing them. Angelina tried to Vanish mine, but they didn't go anywhere, so Harry came down and did them. I'd never seen him look so angry.

In the common room that evening, I sat with Alicia and Angelina, thinking I'd talk to them about the upcoming term, and maybe about Harry a little bit. So I was surprised when he plopped himself down at the table next to me.

"Hi Katie," he said cheerily, and then nodded at my companions. "Alicia, Angelina."

"Hi Harry," Alicia said. "What brings you over here?" His eyes darted to me, and Alicia smirked and Angelina snorted. I just let myself bask in the warm feeling.

"Besides Katie," he said, and I tried not to let him see me melt, "I can't stand to be around Ron and Hermione right now." I looked around; the two of them were as far apart as they could possibly be without leaving the common room, facing each other but not looking at each other. "I don't know what's gotten into them."

"Harry," Angelina said, almost sternly. "Ron is jealous that Hermione went to the ball with Viktor. He knows that he should have asked her properly, but he didn't figure out that she was a girl, and not just a boy with suspicious bits, until he saw her in those robes. Now he's afraid he's missed his chance with her, and he might be right; he's been beastly to her. But he can't even admit to himself that he fancies her. That's what's gotten into them."

Harry stared for a moment, and shook his head. "It's not fair," he said. "I have never had even the slightest clue what's going on in Katie's head, or any other girl's, for that matter. And here you are, across the room, picking Ron apart like a chocolate frog."

Angelina grinned her evil grin. "Oh, I can tell you what's going on in Katie's head," she offered.

"Ange!" I said, and tried to kick her, but missed.

But Harry just grinned back. "No thanks," he said. "It's more fun to find out for myself. When Alicia had to tell me before the ball, there was wand waving and threats. But Katie's always been very nice about telling me."

* * *

I don't know if Harry meant for it to happen this way, but we spent a lot of time together for the next couple of weeks. Ron and Harry had had some kind of disagreement that I couldn't quite puzzle out, and of course Ron and Hermione showed no sign of cooling off towards each other, so it was easy for me to hang around without having to break into their trio. Mostly I studied with Harry and Hermione, and tried to help them figure out what to do about the clue from Harry's golden egg.

Just getting to spend time with him was nice enough, but it was during this time that I really started to get to know Harry better. He and Hermione didn't pull any punches around me, and they were surprisingly forthcoming with details of anything I asked about. I heard the name 'Voldemort' more times in one evening than I had in four and a half years of school. Harry's adventures were amazing, but they also reawakened that little voice in me that had said, 'I have to get out of here.' What Harry had been through at Hogwarts was inexcusable, but nobody was even trying to make excuses for it. It was just his job, apparently.

He wanted to hear about me, too, but I didn't have as much to tell him. I told him about Mum and Dad, of course, and how I was an only child, and how I suspected that Mum and Dad were sad about that. I told him about growing up in Liverpool and finding out I was a witch. He had grown up Muggle too, of course, but I was surprised by how little he knew about the Muggle world. We hadn't seen any of the same movies or television shows, and he hadn't been to London until the first time he went to Diagon Alley.

As much as I enjoyed spending time with him and getting to know him, there was one part of our relationship that didn't seem to be going anywhere. I wasn't exactly jumping all over him, but I did touch him a lot, and I wanted him to know that it was OK to put his arm around me, or even kiss me if the opportunity arose. But he never seemed to take the hint. Every time I put my knee against his, he took a sudden breath, and it was twenty minutes before he relaxed again. He never asked me to stop, and a couple of times I thought I saw a hint of a smile on his face. But he certainly never initiated contact.

I talked to my friends about it, of course. Angelina and Alicia thought it foretold doom and gloom. If he didn't want me to touch him, of course it was because he wasn't really interested in me, and of course there were plenty of reasons why that might be true. Maybe he was bent, or maybe he wasn't over Cho, or maybe Hermione had sunk her hooks in, but Katie Bell had failed. I ended up forbidding Alicia to talk to Harry about it, thinking that a repeat of their pre-Ball conversation would be a bad thing.

Leanne was less concerned about it. The first thing she said when I asked her what she thought was, "At least he's a gentleman." I winced, remembering my dance with Billy. But she didn't think it was a bad sign. When I whinged about it, she'd just say, "Boys are clueless. And he's a little younger. You might just have to show him what you want."

Tempting though that idea was, I talked to Hermione about him instead. She looked very uncomfortable, and at first I thought she didn't want to think about her best friend kissing somebody. But she stumbled through an explanation. "I don't think Harry's family was very loving," she said, "and I think maybe he was a target for bullies in primary school. He just doesn't have any experience with, uh, physical affection. Or maybe any affection at all. Don't take it personally, Katie, but it might take a long time for him to come around."

Well, I felt a little bad for not understanding right away. But I was more determined than ever to at least let him know that I was interested.

* * *

There was a Hogsmeade weekend in the middle of January, which we were going to use for our second date. Hogsmeade isn't a big city or anything, and it's very much the thing among the seventh years to find it backwards and boring. But I hadn't spent that much time there, and Harry had spent even less, so we actually thought it was fun. I mean, it was fun to spend time together outside the castle. But it was also fun to visit the shops, and see all the beautiful and ridiculous things that the magical world had for sale.

We were ignoring our friends, so once we got to the village we had lots of time to talk. We got tired of shopping after a while, and staked out a corner of the Three Broomsticks before the lunch rush. I was trying to inform him telepathically that it was OK to hold my hand at the table, but I didn't seem to be getting through. So I asked him, without really meaning for it to be significant, what was going on with him and Ron.

He drew back a little. "Ron's afraid of me right now," he said. "And I think he should be."

"Are you that angry at him about something?" I asked. I had no idea what he meant.

He sighed. "Look, I don't really understand what happened, but I'll explain as best I can." I nodded encouragingly. "OK, over the Christmas holiday, we were both at Hogwarts. And when there were just a couple of days left, we hadn't finished our Potions essay, either of us. So I told Ron I wanted to get it done that morning." I must have looked incredulous, because he rolled his eyes at me. "I just wanted to get it out of the way, OK? Ron wanted to go flying, but I wouldn't, and we sort of argued about it. And finally he said, 'Fine, I promise, we'll finish Potions before we go flying.' But you know Ron, fifteen minutes later he throws down his quill and says, 'I've had it, I'm going flying.'" Harry stopped and looked around, and leaned in closer to me, which would have been thrilling under different circumstances.

"So here's the bad part," he said. "He gets halfway across the room, and falls on the floor in agony. He told me later that it felt like getting ripped apart from the inside. I ran over to him right away, but there was nothing I could do. Finally he crawled back to the table, and as soon as he picked up his quill, the pain stopped."

I waited, but Harry seemed to be done explaining. "So why is he afraid of you, then?" I asked.

"Well, it must have been something I did. But I don't know what, or how."

"So how is it something you did?"

He looked at me for a minute. Finally, he said, "The only person we've really talked to about it is Hermione. And her best theory is that it has something to do with an oath. That once he promised not to go flying, it made some kind of magical seal or something. But Katie, there's no way I should be able to enforce oaths. And I wouldn't have done it then even if I knew how. There's something really strange going on here, and I don't know what it is, but it hurt Ron really badly."

I tried to reassure him. "Harry, Hermione is very, very smart, but it doesn't sound like she really knows what happened. She's just got a theory, and if the facts don't fit it, then it's not a good theory. I don't know what happened, but if you weren't trying to hurt Ron, then it probably wasn't you who hurt him."

He dropped his eyes. "I wasn't trying to hurt him. But I was really annoyed with him. It could have been accidental magic or something." I leaned forward to take his hand, but he pulled back. "Katie, do me a favor. Just don't make any promises around me, OK? I don't want anything to happen to you."

Well, that was probably the least romantic thing he could have said. But he was so sincerely torn up about it that I told him I wouldn't, and he calmed down.

It turned out that we'd staked out a corner with a table for two, without really meaning to, and the place had filled up while we were talking about Ron. None of our friends had pulled another table over to join us. So we had lunch together, and a couple of butterbeers. Harry had some mysterious afternoon errand he wouldn't tell me about, so I didn't quite spend the whole day with him. But we met back up after a while, and he had a little package tucked under his arm that he didn't say anything about, so I was hopeful that it was a gift for me.

Things seemed different after our conversation at lunch, though. I think he had been really worried about what I'd think about him, and when I hadn't run away screaming, he'd decided that he could trust me a little more. We didn't exactly talk about heavy subjects for the rest of the day, but I still felt like I was seeing more of the real Harry.

We shared a carriage back to Hogwarts. I had managed to snag one for just the two of us, without Harry seeming to notice what I was doing. It's a short ride, so when he was silent for the first thirty seconds, I just leaned up against him. He tensed up and swallowed, so I pulled away a little, but then he turned towards me.

"Katie," he said, "I have a lot of secrets, and I can't tell you all of them. They're not mine to tell, I mean, and they'd put people in danger who I care about. But I want you to know that I trust you. And I just had absolutely the best time today, and-" That's as far as he got before I kissed him.

I mean, later on, I would deny it, and tell him that he had kissed me. But if I'm honest, I started it. And then it kept going, and we'd wrapped our arms around each other, and started experimenting with opening our mouths a little. What stopped it was the carriage arriving at Hogwarts. Well, actually, it was Professor Hagrid, coughing and rapping on the window, probably a minute or two after the carriage had arrive at Hogwarts. We jumped apart, but Professor Hagrid was nice about it; he didn't take points or anything. In fact, I thought he was going to give Harry a big wink and a thumbs up.

* * *

After that, there was no question that Harry and I were together. We'd never really had the talk, but in my mind, I was his girlfriend, and that's how he treated me. He waited for me to go to meals, and he never went to bed without saying good night to me. And slowly, slowly, he got more comfortable with the idea that touching me was a good thing. He'd hold my hand in the corridors on the way to lunch, and give it an extra squeeze before I went up the girls' staircase to bed.

One day, Hermione left us alone at a table in the library, and I got sick of reading about Potions. There was no way I was going beyond the OWL level, anyways. So I shut the book (quietly; Madam Pince didn't need to get involved), and waited for him to look up. When he did, I said, as calmly as I could, "You know, Harry, I really liked it when you kissed me in the carriage. You could do it again, if you wanted."

He sat there blinking for a long time. It would have been funny, if I didn't suspect that the reasons for his discomfort were worse than just being a clueless boy. Finally he shrank in on himself a little, and said, "I liked it too. I just didn't know if it would be OK."

I smiled at him, and put my toe on his. "Harry, is this a real thing?" I asked. Oh, and I'd been doing so well. I tried again. "Are we—?"

He seemed to understand. Actually, he looked a little horrified. "Yes!" he said. "I mean, if you want it to be, I want it to be. I hope you didn't think I was just using you."

I was back on sure footing. "I didn't think that." I smiled at him again, and I may have lowered my eyelashes a little. "It's nice to hear you say it, though. And I do want it to be." He looked a little relieved, but not entirely, so I kept talking. "And if you're my boyfriend, it's OK to put your arm around me when we're walking down the hall. It's OK to kiss me sometimes."

His eyes widened. "Is it?" he asked, like it was Christmas morning.

I nodded as seriously as I could. "Encouraged, even."

"Er, sometimes?"

"Well," I said. "Have a little discretion. Not in the Great Hall in the middle of dinner, for example."

He leaned across the table and kissed me, very quickly and gently. It was heart-stopping; I'd apparently fallen for him so thoroughly that a two-second kiss could make me feel warm all the way to my toes. Then he bit his lip. "What about in the library?" he asked.

I looked around. There were a few people who could see us, but nobody seemed to be paying attention. "Borderline," I answered, "but I'll let you get away with it this time." I couldn't really keep a straight face when I said it. I probably wasn't going to stop smiling for a week.

When Hermione came back, she looked at us suspiciously, but we were very well-behaved in the library. On our way back to the tower, though, Harry put his arm around my shoulder and held on like he would fall down the stairs if he let go, and we started walking more and more slowly. Hermione smirked at us, and then, when we didn't respond, rolled her eyes and hurried ahead, leaving us to walk together.

When I was back from Hogwarts for the summer after my first year, I had started watching Mum and Dad differently, like our ten months apart had made them interesting again. And I noticed the way they'd say goodbye every morning. Dad left for work a little earlier, and the last thing he'd do every morning was put his keys in his pocket, then walk over to where Mum was sitting. She'd pause in her breakfast, and just as he was approaching, she'd turn her head to catch his kiss. He said something a little different every morning—"Bye, sweetie," or, "Have a good day, love,"—but she always replied, "Love you. Bye."

It was a little nauseating at first, to twelve-year-old me. But I started to really admire it after a while. Their love for each other was so ingrained into their lives that they were almost unconscious about it. I started to hope that someday I would feel that way about somebody else.

So, of course, kissing Harry was completely different. Rather than a routine, every kiss for him was an act of will. At first I could see them coming; he'd square his shoulders and look me in the eye like I was his parole officer. Even when they started to come more naturally for him, there was still a little bump he had to get over. It demanded my full attention every time, and it was worth it. I can't tell you how wonderful it made me feel, that he would make that kind of effort for me.

* * *

Harry was approaching the second task with a kind of weary paranoia. His photo album had been in my trunk for two weeks. His Firebolt was in Hermione's dorm room (Why Hermione? Because nobody would ever suspect her of having a broomstick.), shrunken and tucked inside a framed photo of her parents. He couldn't think of anything else he'd "sorely miss", so he made jokes about how attached he was to his Potions textbook, hoping that maybe they'd hide it in the lake.

He'd never learned to swim, but of course I'd been swimming since I was small, and I offered to teach him. Because of Cedric's sense of fair play, he had access to the prefects' bath - that's where he'd heard the message in the egg for the first time. So we snuck in there one evening, and I showed him what I could. It was kind of awkward, though, getting used to being around each other in swim suits, and I don't think he really learned very much. He was sort of dog-paddling with his head above water by the time we finished, and we couldn't really look each other in the eye. When he went back the following week to practice his Bubblehead Charm, he did it on his own, and I didn't feel bad about that.

We did do some spell practice together, and it was then that I realized just how powerful Harry was, magically speaking. His spells tore through my shields like they were tissue paper. I knew it wasn't just me - I'd always been near the top of my year in Defense, and besides, he was doing the same thing to Hermione. We started setting up Cushioning Charms on the floor before we'd let him cast spells in our direction. Even one of his Tripping Jinxes was enough to nearly flip me over.

I watched him practice some fire-based spells one afternoon, and I realized it wasn't just power. He had this incredible intuitive grasp of magic that I'd never seen before. I mean, I'm sure Professor Flitwick could do the same kind of thing, but it wasn't like he demonstrated it in class. Harry started out with _Incendio_, which is great for starting fires if you happen to have a pile of kindling to work with. For me, if I were to cast it with all my strength, I could probably set a table on fire or something, but Harry was scorching the stone walls of the castle with his spells. Then he moved on to _Flagrate_, which is mostly decorative when I use it, but he was making these living, self-sustaining lines of flame. Before I knew it, he was tossing ropes of flame out of his wand like some kind of superpowered _Aguamenti_. He'd send one flying across the room, then hook his wand and it would change direction. He even started making them explode when they hit the walls. When he finally stopped, he was breathing hard, and his face was red from the heat, but he looked totally exhilarated, like he'd just won a 5K, and was ready to run another.

* * *

It never occurred to anyone that they'd take hostages, so when Professor McGonagall told me on the night before the second task that the Headmaster wanted to see me in his office, I didn't think I was in any danger. I didn't think I was in any trouble, either. Mostly I was determined not to tell him about Harry's photo album.

It was evening when I went up there. The Headmaster was sitting behind his massive desk, the reflected lamplight dancing in his glasses. He gave me a kind smile, and said, "Miss Bell."

"Yes, sir?" I said.

"Would you be willing to help us with second task of the tournament?"

"Yes, sir?" I said again. I tried to make it sound like a question. I remember his arm moved a little bit, and that's all.

* * *

I woke up freezing cold, wet, and with somebody pinning my arms to my sides. I panicked, of course, and thrashed around until I was free. I realized I was in the lake, but I was already so cold that it was hard to think. I managed to swim a few terrified strokes, which took me in half a circle, and I looked up to see Harry, barely holding his own head above the water, with a little girl tucked under his left arm. She was in worse shape than I was. I hadn't realized yet that he had been holding on to me, too, and it was him that I'd swum away from. But I could see his wand in his right hand. I hadn't even thought to look for mine, but I didn't have it anyways.

"Harry," I screamed. Well, I tried to scream, but it was too cold to get any air in my lungs, so it came out like a whimper. "Warming charm!"

He twisted his body so his wand was pointing towards me, and panted out the incantation. It was better than hot chocolate; I was warm to the toes right away. While I took a couple of stronger strokes, he bent his arm and repeated the charm on the little blonde girl. Her body relaxed, but her eyes were still wide with fear. I swam up alongside him, slipped my arm under his free one, and started treading water to help hold him up. "What happened?" I asked him.

"They took you," he got out, "and Hermione and Cho and her. I think she must be Fleur's sister." There was a certain resemblance. "Viktor came for Hermione, and Cedric came for Cho, but something must have happened to Fleur. So I untied her, too, and swam up. But you both woke up when I got to the surface, and I couldn't hold you both."

I looked around. We were a few hundred yards from shore. There was a big floating dock where the lake came closest to the castle, and a set of stands built around it. I was warm and full of adrenaline now. "If I help with the little girl, can you swim to the dock?" I asked him.

"If you help," he said. So I switched sides, wrapping one arm around the girl, and dragged her along with sort of a modified sidestroke. Harry paddled along her other side, keeping her steady in the water. I couldn't see her face very well, but after we'd settled into a rhythm, she started kicking steadily, so hopefully she was less afraid than she had been.

It was painfully slow going. Harry hadn't really learned to swim properly, and he must have been tired from the task. The little girl was small and light, but it was all she could do to hold her head above water. And I was dressed in the same robes I'd worn to the Headmaster's office, which weren't exactly practical for swimming. It must have taken us twenty minutes to limp across the lake. The only people on the dock when we got there were the seventh year Gryffindor prefects. The crowd made a lot of noise when we got out of the water, but I couldn't tell if they were cheering or jeering. The judges were sitting in a little booth overlooking the dock, but they barely looked at us. They were too busy arguing with each other. The prefects escorted us, now holding up the little girl, to a little tent off to the side of the dock, where we were met by a very animated Madam Pomfrey.

A lot of things happened quickly when she saw us. She split us up right away, pushing Harry into one room and the little girl and me into another. Apparently this was the girls' side of the medical tent, because Cho Chang, Hermione, and Fleur Delacour were lying in three beds. As soon as the little girl saw Delacour, she let go of my hand and ran towards her. Delacour levered herself out of bed with one hand, showing that her right arm was heavily bandaged, and took a couple of staggering steps to catch the girl. There was a big hug, and the girl started crying, and they started speaking French.

Madam Pomfrey seemed torn for a minute, and then started casting what must have been diagnostic spells on the girl, even as she and Delacour were still hugging and talking. I'd never really gotten a chance to admire the precision of Madam Pomfrey's wand work before, so seeing it up close was impressive. And then I heard the little girl mention Harry's name- I would have missed the "'Arry", but the "Potteur" was unmistakable. Delacour got a little agitated, and they talked a little more, and then they both looked at me, and the girl said, "Oui."

Delacour limped over to me, kissed me on both cheeks, and said, "Sank you. You saved my seester. I will not forget."

I'd never been kissed by a Veela before, so I didn't know what to do at first, but I finally said, "Harry did the hard part. All I had to do was swim. But you're welcome."

Delacour shook her head. "I will not forget," she said again, and then I really didn't know what to say. I mean, I had helped save her little sister, but I didn't see how anybody could have done anything different, and I had no idea how real the danger was. It had been a difficult swim, but hardly life-threatening. What could I tell her? She released the girl and said, "Gabrielle."

The little girl- she couldn't have been more than nine- looked me right in the eye, and said, "Merci." I reached down and gave her a hug, which she returned, and then I stood there at a loss.

But Madam Pomfrey had finally had enough, and she bundled Fleur back to one bed and the girl, Gabrielle, to another. Then she turned her wand on me, muttering as she cast. "Not hypothermic. . . no broken bones. . . are you in any pain?. . . heart functions normal. . . not pregnant. . . lung functions normal. . . " She put down her wand. "Miss Bell, I can't imagine how, but you're as healthy as a hippogriff. You've been through quite an ordeal, so you should take a little rest, but you're certainly not in any danger. How is it that you're not frozen half to death?"

"Harry cast a warming charm on me," I told her. "He's very good at them."

She looked at me like she wasn't sure if I was joking. "Yes, I should say so," she finally said, and I let her put me in a bed. I realized then that I hadn't heard Hermione or Cho say anything yet, but neither of them was next to me, and I thought that calling out to them would be rude. I didn't know what else to say to the Delacours, either. So I lay there and thought about the fact that the Headmaster of my school had knocked me out and left me in the middle of a lake as part of a challenge for my boyfriend.

* * *

I just wanted to go back to the tower and collapse in Harry's arms after that, but of course nothing to do with the tournament was ever that easy. Madam Pomfrey let us all go at once, boys and girls, and there was still quite a crowd in the stands. As soon as we emerged from the medical tent, Delacour grabbed Harry and gave him his thank-you kisses, right in front of a photographer. Harry blushed and protested, looking for me for reassurance. I gave him my best not-mad-at-you smile, and went over and took his hand. How could I be jealous when she had kissed me first? But he winced when I grabbed it, and I realized it was covered with some kind of sticky salve. I hadn't even known he was hurt.

We were all trying to figure out how to get out of there, but it turned out the reason everybody was still in the stands was that they hadn't announced the scores yet. So we had to stand around and listen to Bagman prattle on about sportsmanship and fair play, while the judges glared at each other. Harry didn't even seem to notice the scores, but it didn't escape me that he was in a good position for the final task.

I didn't get my wish until after dinner, and even then we weren't alone. Hermione had been through the task as well, and she was nearly as upset as I was about the whole thing. So the three of us grabbed a couch by the fire, I curled up on Harry, and we talked about it.

Hermione was direct to the point of being shocking. "I knew this tournament was dangerous for you, Harry," she said, "and for Viktor and the rest, too. But I didn't think it was dangerous for me until I woke up in that lake."

Harry looked a little puzzled. "Didn't Professor Dumbledore tell you about the safety measures when he asked you to help?"

Hermione and I exchanged a glance. "All he did was ask if I was willing to help, and knock me out," she said, and I nodded my confirmation. "Were there safety measures in place?"

"I don't know!" Harry said, looking panicked. "I assumed there must be, because I thought neither of you would have agreed to be in the stupid task if it were dangerous! But I never saw any."

"What did you see?" I asked, as gently as I could. I didn't like where this was going.

"Well, I got there first, so all four of you were tied to the statue," he began.

"Tied to the statue?" Hermione shrieked.

Harry took my hand with his good one. "Er, yes. You were all tied to a statue at the bottom of the lake, guarded by mermen. Merpeople. Whatever." Hermione and I exchanged another look. I knew that I'd be dreaming of waking up tied to a statue, unable to breathe, and from the look on her face, she was feeling something similar.

"Cedric came and got Cho, and then Viktor came for you," he continued, as I clung to his hand. "Viktor had trouble with the ropes, so I helped him cut you free. Good thing I saw him transfigure at the beginning, or I might have thought he was part of the task, and fought him. I waited for Fleur, but she never showed up. When the Gillyweed started to wear off, I figured that time was up, so I cut you and Gabrielle free and headed for the surface."

"How did you cut us free?" I asked, desperate to think about something other than drowning.

"Cutting Charm," he said, shrugging.

"Weren't you worried about cutting her arm off?" Hermione asked. She sounded curious, not accusing.

"Hermione," Harry said, and for a minute he sounded like my friend from primary school Josephine's little brother, when she said something he thought was really silly. "I have better control over my cutting charm than that."

"What do you mean, better control?" she asked.

"You just have to make sure it only cuts rope. Or whatever you want to cut." He couldn't make us understand, so he headed over to the kindling basket by the fireplace, grabbed a log, and laid it down on Hermione's Transfiguration book. "_Diffindo_," he said, before Hermione could object.

The log split in half with a loud _crack_. We stared at the unmarked cover of the book underneath. After a moment, Hermione shook her head. "That's not how the Cutting Charm works," she protested. Now it was Harry's turn to be confused, and she grabbed half the log and put it on the table to demonstrate.

"If you practice a spell enough, you can vary the power level you put into it," she explained, and drew her wand. "_Diffindo_," she whispered, and the spell knocked a chip of bark off the log. "You're meant to be able to do this without varying the volume of the incantation, but I haven't managed that yet, so..." She took a deep breath. "_Diffindo_!" she shouted, drawing alarmed looks from around the room. The log split in half, but there was a gouge in the tabletop, too.

Harry frowned. "I can see how that would be harder, because the log and the table are both wood. But you just have to sort of mean it, and then the spell does what you mean."

Hermione and I gave up on trying to convince him that what he was talking about was impossible, since it clearly was possible for him. I chuckled inside thinking about Hermione's next conversation with poor Professor Flitwick. But we turned back to more serious matters quickly.

"So you never saw any safety monitors or anything?" Hermione asked.

Harry shook his head. "Just the merpeople."

"That doesn't mean anything, though. They could have been invisible. But I didn't see any boats or anything to rescue us with. Did the merpeople look strong?"

Harry looked embarrassed. "Well, not that strong. They tried to stop me from taking Gabrielle, but I got away from them."

"Not very effective guards, then. Fleur was so badly hurt that she had to drop out, but nobody went and got her hostage. Time ran out, and one Champion and two hostages were unaccounted for, and even then they didn't send out a search team. Everybody was injured badly enough to require medical care." Hermione was on a roll, but I had to interrupt.

"Not really," I said. "Gabrielle and I were pretty much fine."

"How was that?" she demanded. "You must have been out there for fifteen minutes. I was in the water for less than five minutes, and I was hypothermic and shocky when I got out. I couldn't even walk to the medical tent."

"Harry's really good with warming charms," I offered.

She shook her head, closed her eyes, and rubbed her forehead for a moment. Then she turned to Harry. "And what about you? What happened to your hand?"

He looked downright sheepish this time. "Er, remember how I was working with those fire spells? Well, a big fish surprised me, so I cast one of the flaming ropes at it. Only I got a big cloud of steam, and scalded my hand. Pretty well cooked the fish, though."

She closed her eyes again. "Harry's astonishing capacity for magic notwithstanding, I can't help but think we really were in danger down there. If something had gone wrong, we all could have drowned before the judges knew it."

I finally voiced the feeling I'd had since I saw that dragon. "I'm never going to feel safe at Hogwarts again."

Harry and Hermione were the ones giving each other significant glances this time. Harry took my hand after a moment. "It's been a long time since I really felt safe here," he admitted.

"Well, what can we do?" I asked. My voice was high. "I've thought about going back to the Muggle world, but I can't figure out how to manage it, and I don't really want to give up doing magic. Could we go to one of the other schools?"

Harry squeezed my hand, but it was hard to calm down. "Beauxbatons is obviously no better - they put a nine-year-old down there," he said.

Hermione looked at the table. "I think things would be even worse at Durmstrang," she said. "I get the feeling Viktor took me to the Ball to thumb his nose at the school." Harry sat up straight and started to look angry, so she raised a hand. "I don't mean that he was taking advantage of me. It's just that Muggleborns aren't really welcome there. Taking me to the ball was his way of making a bit of a statement."

Harry relaxed a little. "Good for him, I suppose. I wish he could have found a way to make a statement without making you a target, though."

"What about America, or Australia?" Hermione said. I could tell she was changing the subject deliberately. But none of us really knew anything about the rest of the magical world, so Hermione agreed to do some research. We lingered as long as we could, but eventually we all had to go back to our own beds. I lay there trying to think about anything but cold black water. The only thing that helped was thinking about Harry, and his way-too-powerful warming charms, but that had its own set of problems.


	4. Chapter 4

I'd been ignoring it for a little while, but it was time for me to get serious about my upcoming OWLs. I spent a fair amount of time with Leanne, who was really my closest friend in my year. We wound up complementing each other pretty well - I was much better in wanded subjects, and Leanne was stronger in Potions and Herbology. But it was hard to talk to her about some things. Of course she wanted to know all about my relationship with Harry, and I was willing to share some of that with her. She and Billy had gone their separate ways after the Ball, which she was a little bitter about, but she never took it out on Harry.

But the tournament had really changed the way I saw the magical world, and she didn't seem to get it. I tried to tell her how scared I'd been when I woke up in the lake, or when I saw the dragon, but she kind of shrugged it off. "It all worked out fine, didn't it?" was about the most she'd say. I'd sort of hinted that I didn't want to stay at Hogwarts, but she didn't show any interest, and I didn't know how to convince her that the Headmaster would sell her kidneys for pocket change if he thought he could get away with it.

Harry and Hermione and I had sort of developed an us-against-the-world way of looking at things. I don't mean that we were isolated or anything - we hung out with our Quidditch teammates some, and Ron was apparently over his fear of Harry, though they weren't as close as before. But we shared this basic idea that Hogwarts was dangerous and crazy, and we counted on each other for backup.

Like I said, I hadn't spent much time with Hermione in the past, but that changed after the second task. She sort of adopted me as one of her projects. I mean, of course she was thinking about her own OWLs already, so it was almost like she was living vicariously through me as I studied for them. I tried not to think that she was also living vicariously through me as I dated Harry; that wouldn't be fair to her. She was a great study partner: fantastically organized, and busy enough with other things that when I got fed up and went to go for a little walk with my boyfriend, she'd just shrug and pull out a book on magical contract enforcement or something. Alicia and Angelina were really helpful, too, plus they had the benefit of actually having taken their OWLs.

Harry was studying with us, too. He wasn't exactly on the OWL preparatory track, but there were some useful spells for him. And about once a week, he'd make some incredible magical leap that had Hermione and I shaking our heads. I remember when he figured out how to make his Banishing Charms work in any direction, not just directly away from him. He spent the rest of the day conjuring little cotton balls and pelting me and Hermione with them from all different directions. I think he was even combining Banishing and Levitating Charms by the end of the day. It was amazing to watch.

I was sort of dreading Valentine's day. Not because I thought Harry would forget about it or something, but people get so worked up about it, and I didn't want it to be a big deal. But it turned out that I shouldn't have been worried. There was a box of Honeydukes chocolates and a card for me from Harry. The card was very sweet, especially because I could imagine him agonizing about what to write, and then giving up and writing down exactly what he was feeling in the smallest words possible. It was reassuring, both that he felt that way and that I understood what he was feeling. And, in fact, it wasn't all that different than the card I'd sent him.

But it wasn't the chocolates and the card that made me feel so good about our relationship. It was the increasing feeling that Harry really trusted me. He'd shown me the Marauders' Map, which was one of the neatest magical things I'd ever seen. And it was really endearing how it obviously meant so much to him to have something of his dad's. I didn't really know how to show him how sad I was for him to have lost his parents, and how inspiring it was that he'd grown up to be such a good person anyways. But I tried.

He also explained to me his theories about what had happened in the Great Hall on Halloween, when he'd fought the Goblet of Fire. He didn't say so, but I got the feeling that this was a big secret to him, one he hadn't discussed with Hermione. He thought, to put it simply, that he'd fought the goblet and won. That he wasn't actually obligated to participate in the tournament at all, though it was too risky to just sit out the events. And that the goblet had given him some magic, after he'd won his argument. He'd only overheard some of the talk that Dumbledore and Moody had about the goblet right afterward, but there were two things that stood out: there was evidence of Compulsion and Confunding charms on the goblet, and the goblet itself didn't seen to be magical at all anymore. I didn't really have a way to test his theory, but he didn't seem to want to anyways. He just wanted to share it, and I was thrilled to be the one he shared it with.

* * *

Time passed quickly, as winter turned to spring. We were busy, and we were happy, and our busyness and happiness made it easy to bury the fear we were feeling, both about the situation at Hogwarts in general, and the upcoming third task. We studied, and when we couldn't study any more Harry and I would go for a little walk, and when we couldn't snog any more, we'd sit and talk about where we'd go when we could get out of Hogwarts. It was easy to dream of a beautiful magical world to escape to, and a lot harder to figure out how to get there.

The OWLs hit first. They were everything I'd worried about, but I was pretty well prepared, too. I was taking the core courses plus Care and Runes, so my schedule was full. The exams were long and tiring, magically as well as mentally. The funny thing was, they were long enough that I actually had time to miss Harry while I was taking them. Of course, he was exempt from his own exams, so he was just practicing spells for the final task. They'd banned him from using his broom in the task, or he probably would have been out flying.

The constant problem for couples at Hogwarts was finding any real privacy. Hiding in a broom closet felt kind of tawdry, and empty classrooms weren't really very private - I think they even taught the prefects how to detect locking spells, in case anybody got too creative. But the night I finished my OWLs, Harry managed to convince his roommates to leave his room for an hour after dinner, and gave me a backrub on his bed. Even that was a little risky, so we made very sure not to do anything that would get us expelled if McGonagall were to burst into the room without warning. But I wanted to. Oh, how I wanted to. I tried to relax and let his fingers work their magic, and it worked a little too well, because I fell asleep.

The next thing I knew, he was whispering in my ear, telling me to wake up. It was a very pleasant way to awaken, but when I realized where I was, I was embarrassed. I tried to apologize to him for falling asleep and wasting our time together, but he just shook his head and looked at me with unbearable tenderness. "I hope this doesn't sound creepy," he said, "but I really liked watching you sleep." And then he gave me several very nice kisses, and then we really had to stop before somebody walked in on us.

I thought about it on my own later on, down in the common room. I really liked where my relationship with Harry was, and where I hoped it was going. I trusted him, and I loved him. Wait, that was new. Did I really love him? I was starting to think that I did. I was also starting to think that maybe I wanted to sleep with him (and not just sleep on his bed while he gazed at me adoringly). But I wasn't quite ready to talk to him about it, remembering Hermione's long-ago warning about distracting him. After the third task, maybe I would bring it up.

* * *

The day of the final task, I had to eat breakfast by myself. There was some kind of event for the Champions and their families. I felt bad for Harry, because of course there was nobody to come for him. For a wild moment, I wished they'd invited my parents, but I couldn't imagine writing that letter home. Of course they knew about Harry because of the Ball, and I'd made sure to mention him in my letters from time to time, but they probably weren't ready to be considered his family. So instead I just wished they'd invited me.

I went to pick him up, and accidentally got to meet the other Champions' families as they all left the room. The Krums didn't really pay any attention to me, and the Diggories just said a polite hello (Cedric's dad was apparently some kind of higher-up in the Ministry). But the Delacours shook my hand soberly, and repeated Fleur's assurance that they would not forget what I had done for them. Gabrielle herself was there, too, and when she wasn't soaking wet and terrified, she was quite a little sweetheart. Watching her skip away put a smile on my face, and walking away hand in hand with Harry kept it there.

It was mostly a matter of keeping Harry distracted for the rest of the day. He was as prepared as he could possibly be, so he didn't want to practice, and he didn't have any other responsibilities. Normally, we would have gone flying, but the Quidditch pitch was off limits, of course, and I didn't want to fly over the lake. So we wandered around the grounds and talked, and found a quiet courtyard for a quick snog, and ate lunch with our friends, and before we knew it, Harry had to go to the Champions' tent, and I had to go sit in the stands. I gave him a kiss and told him to come back safe, and he gave me a big squeeze.

* * *

The maze covered the entire Quidditch pitch, with a big empty spot in front of the stands where the trophy waited on a pedestal. The judges had the top box, of course, and the visiting dignitaries and hangers-on claimed the upper parts of the stands, so we were pretty low down. We could see the trophy clearly, but we couldn't really see into the maze at all, and we couldn't even see the entrance where the champions started. The only way we could tell where they were was by a charm that hung a big, brightly colored ball over the head of each champion, visible above the maze's hedge walls.

Dumbledore made a huge boom with his wand, and Harry's red ball and Cedric's yellow ball entered the maze. They split up almost immediately, and found their own paths through the maze. As long as the red ball was moving, I was OK. But every time it stopped, I dug my fingers into Hermione's wrist, and tried not to imagine the ferocious beast or nasty magical trap that Harry was dealing with. Krum's green ball and Delacour's blue one joined them after just a few minutes, and we watched them zig-zag over the hedges.

It was a maze, of course, so it was impossible to tell who was leading. We got occasional flashes of spellfire when one of the balls was stopped, but we couldn't see what they were casting or what they were fighting against. But then, after maybe twenty minutes, the blue ball just stopped. There didn't seem to be any kind of battle going on; it just hung in one spot. The Beauxbatons sections of the stands got very quiet, and I waited to see if somebody would go into the maze to check on Fleur, but nobody did that I could see.

After another ten minutes, it started to look like the remaining three balls were getting closer and closer, almost like they were getting funneled together. Green and yellow came together first, and we clearly heard a man screaming - the first really distinguishable sound we'd heard from the maze. The red ball doubled its speed, and when it got close to the other two, the screaming stopped. All three balls hung in place for a minute, and then the red and yellow proceeded away from each other, while the green remained still. An ugly murmur rose from the Durmstrang students, and you didn't have to understand German (or Bulgarian or whatever most of them spoke) to know what they were saying: Cedric and Harry had teamed up to take out Krum. It did look bad, but I couldn't imagine Harry doing that, and I wondered what had really happened.

The red and yellow balls gradually got closer to the trophy. They still took agonizingly long pauses, and it was still a maze, so they'd take long detours, but they were getting closer, and the crowd was starting to get excited. By the time they started to get really close, the Hogwarts students were all on our feet, cheering. Harry and Cedric's routes had taken them in different directions, but they burst into opposite sides of the clearing at almost the same moment. They slowed down a little to orient themselves, and spotted each other. Harry raised a hand in greeting, but neither of them stopped. And then a giant spider crashed out of the maze behind Cedric, reached down, and bit him on the shoulder.

Cedric gave a sort of strangled shout, and dropped to his knees. The spider grabbed him with its front legs and started to pick him up, but then Harry hit it with one of his long ropes of flame, nearly cutting it in half. The spider collapsed and dropped Cedric, and Harry banished the twitching mess back into the maze. Cedric didn't get up, or even move, and Harry sprinted across the clearing, past the cup, and crouched down at his side. After just a moment, he fired off a shower of red sparks from his wand, and then, when no help came, picked Cedric up. He must have cast a featherlight charm, but I didn't see him do it. He carried Cedric to the pedestal, fumbled with his wand for a moment, then grabbed the trophy. And they both disappeared.

The crowd had gotten very quiet when Cedric had gone down, but when he and Harry disappeared, it started to buzz again, and everybody had the same question: where did they go? Hermione and I looked at each other, and I'm sure we were sharing the same sinking feeling. "Maybe the trophy was a portkey to the medical tent," she said uncertainly. "All the other tasks ended up there, right?" I tried to pretend that I agreed, but then I spotted Dumbledore in the clearing, moving faster than any hundred-year-old man had a right to. He got to the pedestal and started casting spells. The rest of the judges were right behind him, and then a bunch of Hogwarts professors joined them, and I knew that whatever had happened, it wasn't according to plan. Hermione and I leaped out of our seats and ran down to the pitch.

Nobody stopped us when we got to the clearing, but it was obvious that we had no real business being there, so I gave Hermione a little glare that meant 'don't start asking questions', and we sort of hid behind Professor McGonagall. She seemed the least likely to run us off. Cho Chang joined us after a minute or two, and I was actually almost glad to see her.

When we got there, Dumbledore was talking. "Oh, it was certainly a portkey, Alastor, there is no doubt about that. But answering that question leaves us with many more to ask." His wand never stopped moving, and his voice was tense.

Professor Moody fixed that creepy eye on Madame Maxime. "Of course, you've got to wonder who would want to kidnap the tournament winner. Maybe one of the losing schools?" He snapped around almost a full hundred and eighty degrees to focus on Bagman. "Or somebody with a gambling problem, hoping to muddy the waters of who truly won?"

Dumbledore's wand sagged. "Alastor, such speculation is hardly helpful at this point," he said wearily. "Surely our efforts would be better spent on determining the location of our two missing champions." Madame Maxime didn't look satisfied with Dumbledore's response; in fact, she looked ready to start hexing Moody. Dumbledore lowered his wand entirely as the judges threatened to erupt.

Before they could say anything else, the Minister of Magic shouldered his way to the front of the group with his retinue. The Diggories were right behind him, and the Delacours stopped at the edge of the group. "Here, now, Dumbledore," Minister Fudge demanded, "where's the winner gone? We've got a prize to give and a celebration to start."

Dumbledore took a deep breath. "Cornelius, we cannot determine where Mr. Potter and Mr. Diggory have gone. The trophy was turned into a portkey, by whom we do not know, and I am working to determine its destination." Mrs. Diggory gave a sharp sob and grabbed her husband's arm. Dumblefore continued speaking to the Minister.. "If you would lend me some of your Aurors, they might be helpful in investigating some of the other mysterious events of the last hours."

"After disgraceful conspiracy to sabotage other competitors?" Headmaster Karkaroff interrupted angrily. "British Aurors will not be investigating unsupervised." He raised his hand above his head, snapped his fingers, and whistled, and half a dozen Durmstrang staff made their way out of the stands.

Minister Fudge ignored Karkaroff completely. "I'm afraid it's quite impossible, Dumbledore," he said briskly. "The security of the Minister's person must take precedence in an uncertain situation like this." He paused, and got an ugly look on his face for a moment. "I must say, Dumbledore, you've made quite a hash of this tournament."

The group descended into chaos. They all started shouting at each other, and accusing each other of kidnapping Harry and Cedric for some horrible purpose. After a few minutes, the judges got organized enough to simultaneously cast a spell that made the hedge walls of the maze shrivel away. Their disappearance revealed Krum and Delacour lying on the ground, both some distance away. Madame Maxime immediately took off running towards Delacour, with her parents following, and Professor McGonagall joined them at a gesture from Dumbledore. Karkaroff sent a couple of Durmstrang professors towards Krum, and Snape followed close behind.

Professor Sprout pulled the Diggories aside and began trying to reassure them, and Cho followed them after a moment. The Headmaster and Professor Moody continued arguing with the remaining judges and the Minister. Professor Flitwick was actually casting spells; I suppose he was so small that nobody else noticed what he was doing.

I should have broken down, or shouted at them, or done something, but the whole situation was too much like a nightmare to seem real. Harry was gone, Harry was missing, Harry had been kidnapped, and only tiny, jolly Professor Flitwick was even trying to find out where he'd gone. The Headmaster had been trying, and as suspicious as I was of him, I was still hopeful that he could figure out what was going on. But he'd been hopelessly sidetracked by some kind of argument with Minister Fudge, and I hadn't seen him raise his wand in what seemed like hours.

Hermione and I stood there silently, horrified at what was going on and powerless to do anything about it, completely ignored by all the useless powerful wizards around us. Krum and Delacour were escorted over to the medical tent, Delacour's group pale and wide-eyed, Krum's group having a vicious, quiet argument. I don't know how long we waited, but nothing got any better, and the crowd started to rumble. Rumors must have been flying all over.

Harry and Cedric reappeared in the middle of all of this, right next to the pedestal, in a shower of magical sparks. Harry was still carrying Cedric. Everybody else was so busy arguing that they didn't seem to realize what had happened. As Harry was laying Cedric gently on the ground, I was running as fast I could to him. I got to him before anybody else did, and crushed him in a hug. "I'm OK, Katie, I'm OK," he said, and I started to relax, even as I noticed he was bleeding. "But nothing else is," he finished. Before I could even say anything, Dumbledore had somehow slipped in between us, and he and Minister Fudge and everybody else were crowding around Harry. I was back to being invisible, apparently, and I was soon pushed to the edge of the circle.

Nobody said anything for a minute, and then Dumbledore broke the silence. In has calmest, quietest voice, he asked, "What happened, Harry?"

"Cedric is dead," he said. Mrs. Diggory screamed, and Mr. Diggory looked like he'd been hit in the head with a rock. "It was Voldemort. I got his wand, and then I got away." And he dropped a wand on the ground in front of him. Everybody took a step back, like the wand could hurt them all by itself.

Then Fudge stepped forward, looking furious. "Did Dumbledore put you up to this, boy?" he demanded?

Harry looked at him in total shock. "Did Dumbledore put me up to what?"

"These lies about the Dark- about Lord- he's dead, and you know it. Dumbledore wants to stir up trouble, and apparently you're his tool. Congratulations, Potter. In the finest traditions of this tournament, you've eliminated all your competitors, so you're the winner." He tossed a bag at Harry's feet; it clanked heavily. "And you're already abusing your fame."

Harry looked at the bag, and then at the Minister. "I didn't- the only one I eliminated was Krum, and he had Cedric under the Cruciatus. What was I meant to do?"

Fudge turned away in disgust. "Aurors, arrest him."

But before they could move, Moody had crouched in front of Harry, grabbed the wand Harry had dropped, and raised it high above his head. "The Dark Lord is risen!" he shouted. "You shall know his power!" Dumbledore's red spell hit him just as he disappeared.

The Aurors looked at the spot where Moody had been, then at Dumbledore. Before they could return their attention to Harry, he disappeared himself, with a loud crack. Then I felt his arms encircle me from behind- I never doubted that it was him- and I felt a sickening sensation, like I'd taken a roller coaster into a black hole. I closed my eyes and fought with my stomach, and when I opened them again, I was in a dark cave with a big black dog, and Harry's arms still holding me.

He let go of me. "Katie," he said nervously. "I'm sorry I grabbed you, but they'd already taken you away from me once, and I swore I wouldn't let it happen again. And I had to get out of there - I couldn't let them arrest me for fighting Voldemort." The dog, which had been wagging its tail enthusiastically, sat down abruptly.

"It's OK," I said, and kissed him for reassurance. "I wanted to get out of there too. But did you just Apparate us here?"

"I think so," he said. "I've never really learned how, so maybe it was something else."

The dog whined once, then lifted his paw and laid it on Harry's wrist. No, I realized, on his watch. He looked at me in alarm. "It looks like we don't have much time," he said, and I took a hard look at that dog. "This is one of those big secrets, and this isn't how I wanted to tell you, but I promise you he doesn't mean us any harm. This dog is Sirius Black, he's my godfather, and everything you know about him is wrong."

"Harry," I tried to object, and then the dog changed into a man. A thin, filthy, shaggy-haired man who was holding his hand out to me.

"Sirius Black," he said. "Pleasure to meet you, Katie. I've heard a lot about you." I grabbed his hand, then let go of it without shaking and grabbed Harry's.

"This is kind of a surprise," I said, and when I heard myself say it I realized how dumb it must sound, but I didn't have anything better.

"Explanations will be forthcoming," Black said, and I have to admit that every second that went by without him hexing me was a relief, "but not here. An Auror team can trace an Apparition in about five minutes, and we had better be long gone before they get here." And he turned and jogged towards the mouth of the cave.

"Sirius, wait," Harry called, and Black turned around. "I can buy us half an hour or so." He led me by the hand to Black's side, grabbed Black with his other hand, and pulled us into the black hole again.

We emerged on a quiet hilltop, overlooking a ramshackle little house with more floors than seemed strictly possible. I tried to let go of Harry's hand and catch my breath, but he held it firmly, and Apparated us again. This time we appeared on a little island - not much more than a rock in the middle of the ocean. My stomach was very unhappy at this point, and when I realized that Harry was going to do it again, I closed my eyes. I think we went three or four more times before we stopped on solid ground for a minute. I swallowed a few times and opened my eyes. We were on a dimly lit train platform, completely alone.

Black caught on before I did. "Platform Nine and Three Quarters, Harry? Why here?"

"Because we can disappear into Muggle London from here."

Black looked at him. "Not a bad plan, except you're wearing robes, and I'm a wanted criminal in the Muggle world, too. And do you have any Muggle money?"

His face fell. "No," he said.

Black smiled, which was kind of a horrible sight. Dental care was not, apparently, one of the perks of going to Azkaban. "Fortunately, I've got some practice at being on the run. How's your Transfiguration?"

Harry looked at him hopefully. "A little spotty, but not bad. What's your plan?"

"If you have enough left in you to Apparate us twice more, you should take us back to the last spot. We can transfigure your clothes there, make a leash and collar for me, and maybe get that arm bandaged up. Any other magic we need to do, we can do it there. There will be owls running all over the country with underage magic notices, but it's probably better if we don't bring any of them here. Then we'll come back here, you and your girlfriend can take your dog for a little walk, and I'll lead you to a place I know. It's not exactly safe, but only Dumbledore can find us there for now, and we're not going to stay for long."

Harry looked at me, and I shrugged. "Unless you want to throw yourself on the mercy of my Mum and Dad, I don't have anything better."

"Dumbledore will go to them. The Aurors might, too," Black interrupted.

Harry nodded. "All right," he said, grabbed our hands, and off we went for another gut-crunching leap.

We reappeared next to a rushing river, with a bridge high above us. "Where are we?" I asked.

Harry gestured upwards. "That's the bridge the Express goes over, about an hour after it leaves London."

Black looked skeptical. "How can you recognize this place well enough to Apparate to it, if you've only seen it from the train?"

"I haven't only seen it from the train. I saw it from a flying car once, too," Harry explained. He sounded completely serious, and Black and I looked at each other in amazement. It was the first human interaction I'd had with him, and it made him that much less scary to me. But it also made me think of what Hermione would have said, and thinking of Hermione and the rest of our friends made me start to realize how big a deal our running away was.

Harry was already working, though. He Transfigured his robes into a fairly decent tee-shirt and jeans. Then he reached over and took off my Gryffindor tie. I knew why he was doing it, but the gesture still had an intimacy that put my heart in my throat for a minute. He Transfigured the tie into a collar and leash that looked fresh off the shelf of the pet shop. There were even a couple of clinking metal tags, though when I picked them up to look, there was nothing printed on them.

He turned to look at me. "All right, Katie, I'll do my best, but I really wasn't planning on picking out your clothes for you. I'm not sure I can do a dress, unless you want me to try to copy the one you wore to the Yule Ball."

I smiled ruefully. "What you're wearing will be fine," I told him. He wove his wand for a moment, and I gasped involuntarily. "Too tight!" I hissed. He gave his wand two quick jerks, and I could breathe again. "Thanks," I said.

I looked down at myself, and saw that he'd done a nice job. I would have looked fine walking around Liverpool in a black tee-shirt and black jeans, and I couldn't imagine that London would be any different. Then I looked up, and caught Harry looking at me. He blushed, and I laughed and kissed him, and I would have kissed him some more if Black hadn't coughed at us.

"Time to go, kids," he said, not quite hiding a smile. "I'll change as soon as we get back. Follow my lead, and I'll take us where we need to go."

Harry looked at me. "You look pretty good," he said, and I'm sure I blushed. "But how do I look?"

He looked exhausted, hurt, and filthy. I hesitated, and his shoulders dropped. "Nothing for it, then," he said, and turned his wand on himself. "_Scourgify. Scourgify._"

"Much better," I reassured him.

"I hate doing that," he said. "I'd give anything for a shower. Anything else, Sirius?"

Black shook his head. "Time to get moving. Harry, no magic after the last apparition. You either, M- Katie. The Underage Magic department is remarkably efficient." I did have my wand, but it didn't sound like it was going to do us much good.

Then Harry took our hands, and I shut my eyes. By the time I felt well enough to open them, Harry was slipping Black's leash on. "All right, Snuffles, be a good boy," he said. I was still laughing when we went through the barrier.

Luck was not on our side. The first corner we rounded was hiding two London cops, and they were immediately interested in Black. "Do you have a ticket for that dog, son?" the tall one asked.

I had frozen when I saw them, and when he spoke to us I seriously considered running, but Harry was holding my hand. "Uh, no, sir," he said, smiling slightly. "He's not going on the train. We were here to meet my uncle, and maybe surprise him a little, but his train's delayed, so we're just on our way out."

The policeman frowned. "Make sure that dog stays on his leash."

"Yes, sir," Harry said, and started walking. The policeman nodded, and we made our way out of the station, my heart still pounding.

Once we'd put a safe distance between ourselves and the crowds around the station, I turned to Harry. "I don't even know what to ask you first," I said.

"Let me explain to you that my godfather isn't going to murder you while you sleep," he said. I hadn't even thought as far ahead as where we might be sleeping, but I did want to hear about Black.

Harry told me, as we followed Black himself through the streets of London. (He got a lot of attention, since he looked like a cross between a Great Dane and Goofy, all big square head and droopy jowls and prancing walk. He was absolute rubbish at pretending to be a dog, too; it was obvious that he was listening to our conversation, and a couple of times he poked Harry with his nose when Harry was leaving out details.)

Black's story was hard to believe, but the obvious affection he had for Harry went a long way towards convincing me. Having his godfather spend a decade in Azkaban helped explain why Harry had been so panicked when Fudge had ordered the Aurors to arrest him. When it had happened, I hadn't really understood why he'd run, but it made sense that he would be afraid of the same thing happening to him, especially since he didn't have the defense of being an Animagus. As far as I knew, anyways.

Then he told me what had happened after he grabbed the cup. Black dropped back to walk alongside Harry for the story, which made me feel a little better. It was starting to get dark, and we were walking through neighborhoods that didn't seem at all nice.

"It was a portkey, of course, and it seemed like it took us pretty far away. We landed in a graveyard. I put Cedric down, but before I could get my bearings, I got hit by a stunner. When I woke up, I was tied to a grave. Wormtail was there, and there was a cauldron, boiling on a fire, with this weird little dwarf in it. The dwarf started talking about how lucky I was to witness his resurrection, and I realized it was Voldemort. Wormtail did this ritual - first he tossed in the 'bone of the father,' then he cut my arm and added the 'blood of the enemy,' then he cut off his own hand and threw it in. The cauldron bubbled and steamed for a minute, and then Voldemort stood up out of it, life size and twice as evil." I shut my eyes for a minute.

"I could see Cedric on the ground to the side of me, and he was still breathing, but I knew he was in bad shape. I didn't have my wand. Wormtail was standing there crying and bleeding, and the first thing Voldemort said was, 'Robe me, Wormtail.' It was the weirdest thing I've ever heard. But then he put his wand up against Wormtail's Dark Mark, and a bunch of people started Apparating in, and as soon as they saw Voldemort they'd bow down before him, and then back away. I recognized Lucius Malfoy. Once there were twenty or thirty of them, Voldemort started talking about how they'd all failed him, and only Pettigrew had been faithful. They were all terrified of him. Then he said he'd prove to them how powerful he was, by defeating a fourteen-year-old boy who didn't have his wand. That wasn't quite how he said it, though." Black whined, and I laced my fingers tightly through Harry's.

"So he turns to me and says, 'Harry Potter, have you been taught to duel?' I don't know how he managed to hiss my name; it doesn't have any esses in it. And I said 'yes,' and he said he would duel me, and I said, 'On one condition.' The Death Eaters got really quiet, but Voldemort just sort of smirked at me, and said, 'What are your terms?' And I said, 'Let Cedric go.' He said, 'Very well, Harry Potter, I give you my word that no harm will come to your friend.' Then he untied the ropes and tossed me my wand, and told me to bow. I didn't really want to, but I'd said I'd duel him for real, and besides, he had to bow to me too."

Harry paused for a minute, and squeezed my hand tightly. He'd told his story so far without really stopping, but he didn't seem to want to go on. Finally, he said, "Then he said, 'You will learn many lessons today, Harry Potter, before your death. Let this be the first: You have no power to negotiate with me.' And he pointed his wand at Cedric and cast the K-Killing Curse." We had to stop walking for a hug then.

"As soon as he did it, there was this big rush of magic. It was just like the day with the Goblet, in the Great Hall, and the rush of magic went from him to me. He didn't seem to understand what was happening, but neither of us could really do anything while it was happening. It felt like it lasted for a long time. As soon as it was done, we pointed our wands at each other, and he cast the Killing Curse again, and I said, 'Expelliarmus.' But his spell didn't work, so I got his wand. The Death Eaters didn't do anything right away, so I tossed out as many stunners as I could while I was picking up Cedric, and then I grabbed the cup. It portkeyed us right back to the Quidditch Pitch, and you know the rest."

The rest was his complete betrayal by the Minister of Magic, right after surviving (and possibly defeating?) Voldemort one more time. And his snap decision to make a run for it, rather than try to explain himself. I was a little overwhelmed by everything that had happened, but I was sure that I was better off with him than back on the Quidditch pitch. As long as I was with him, I was going to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and do what I could to ease the pain he felt about Cedric's murder.

The walk wasn't that long, and we soon turned into a dead end street of crumbling, once-grand homes. Darkness was falling, and even though I couldn't see anybody, I couldn't escape the feeling of being watched. The dog led us to number 12, and then around the side into a narrow alley with a wrought-iron gate leading to the back garden. When we were hidden from the street, he turned back into a man.

"The house I grew up in," he explained shortly, a mixture of pride and pain on his face. "Nobody's lived here for years. I don't exactly have a key, but I always had another way in." And he scaled the fence next to the gate, stepped up onto a piece of molding, shuffled halfway along the side of the house until he reached a window, and pushed it open with his hands. After an awkward false start, he pulled himself inside, then leaned back out and waved at us.

"We're going to go make a phone call," I called up to him. He nodded and disappeared, and I took Harry's hand and led him back out to the street.

"He seems nice," I said, to his unasked question. When he looked at me like I was making fun of him, I explained. "He obviously cares about you. So he's OK in my book."

Harry accepted that, then asked, "Why are we making a phone call?"

"Your godfather said Dumbledore would go to my parents. I want them to hear from me first." He winced, and let me lead him around the corner and down the block to the phone box I'd seen on our way there.

I made a collect call to my parents number. It was after 9:00 on a weeknight, so I expected them to be home, and my mum answered before the second ring. "Katherine? Are you all right?" she asked, and then moved the phone away from her mouth. "David, it's Katherine." She always was a worrier, but this time she was right to be worried.

"I'm OK, Mum, I'm OK." I heard a click that told me my father had picked up the extension in the bedroom. "Listen, Mum, Dad, this is hard to explain, and I don't have much time, but I want you to know that I'm safe. I, uh, I finished my exams, and the last event of the tournament was today, and a lot of things went wrong. I've, uh, I've left school with Harry."

Mum was apparently too shocked to say anything, so it was up to Dad. "Katie, what happened?" he asked. "I can't think of a good reason for you to leave school with your boyfriend, but I can think of a lot of bad reasons."

"Dad, I promise you that it's not any of the bad reasons you're thinking of. I'm not pregnant, for starters. Just- the headmaster will probably come see you soon, and maybe the Aurors, too, and they're going to tell you a lot of things that are wrong. They're going to say I was kidnapped, and I wasn't. They're going to say Harry's a criminal, and he's not. I promise, I'm not in any danger."

"Katherine, every time you say you're safe, I believe it less and less," Mum said.

Dad interrupted her. "Katie, are you running away with your boyfriend, or is it something worse?"

"I'm not running away with my boyfriend!" Hmmm. Maybe I was. "We're not alone, we're with his godfather. They think Harry did something wrong, but he didn't."

Dad might have gotten a little worked up about that, but Mum spoke first. "Katherine, come home. You'll be safe here. Bring Harry if you have to, just come home."

"I can't, Mum." I felt totally empty when I said it. "They'll look for me there, and you can't keep me safe. We have to find a way to get the truth out before they find Harry." That was the closest thing to a plan that I had.

"I'm your mother, Katie," she said.

"They have wands, Mum, and nothing you'd recognize as a legal system. You can't fight them. Listen, I really have to go. I promise you that I'll tell you the whole story as soon as I can. Just- I haven't done anything wrong, Mum, and neither has Harry. I love you. I'll call you when I can." I hung up the phone before I could hear her cry.

I wasn't that far from crying myself. Harry put his arm around me, and I let myself lean into his shoulder as we walked back to Black's creepy old house.


	5. Chapter 5

Black was waiting for us in the alley, looking pretty pleased with himself. Before we could say anything, he was presenting Harry with a dirty old sack. Harry peeked inside, raised his eyebrows, and passed it to me. I looked; it was full of coins. Mostly small change, but there was a good helping of pounds in there (along with some shillings and some coins I didn't even recognize). "Muggle money!" I said.

"Courtesy of Creature," Black frowned. "Is there enough to get us on a train?"

I looked again, and then Harry let go and I almost dropped the sack, it was so heavy. "I should think so," I said, since I was apparently the expert on the Muggle world. "But won't we attract too much attention with an enormous dog?"

Black grinned again, and produced a wand from his sleeve. "This one was my brother's," he said. "His room's still a bloody shrine. If you need any of his schoolbooks I can go back for them. They're still in his trunk." He paused for a moment, rubbing his left thumb. "It's the only safe room in the house, actually. I got bit by what I hope was a doxy in the kitchen."

"Will it work for you?" Harry asked.

"Well enough," Black replied. "You won't be accompanied by a dog, or an escaped criminal." He pointed the wand at his chin and cast a glamour, turning himself into a hideous caricature of a homeless alcoholic. He was easily the ugliest thing I'd ever seen, and I'd chopped potions ingredients for Snape. He smiled; the glamour had even managed to make his teeth worse. "How do I look?" he rasped.

Harry and I shared a glance. "You look a bit scary, Sirius," he finally ventured.

"All right, then." And he cast another glamour. This time he came out looking like a marble statue of a Soviet propaganda poster. His features were attractive enough, but the dead white of his skin and eyes was a little distracting.

Harry shook his head. Black started to look a little nervous, but he pointed the wand at his chin once again.

It was the sixth try that we finally decided was good enough. He still looked terrible, but it was maybe the kind of terrible that would pass without comment in London. Once he'd finished sulking about how badly his brother's wand worked for him, he sketched out the rest of his plan.

"We've got some Muggle funds, and I can probably travel in the Muggle world like this. We've even got a wand without a trace on it, although it's not working as well as I'd like. Let's take some Muggle transportation out of London, away from all those Apparition trails and ancient family homes, and make a new plan in a nice safe Muggle city in the morning."

Harry looked at me, and when I didn't object, he nodded. "OK. Back to King's Cross?"

"That's what I meant about the Apparition trails. We'll have to go to one of the other train stations. I think Liverpool Street is in the opposite direction."

Even hearing the name of my home city was enough to send another pang of homesickness through me, but I followed him through his wretched neighborhood. When I trusted my voice again, I offered a version of the plan I'd been thinking about since I talked to Mum.

"I think we have to get the truth out there," I said. "It sounds like we can't trust Fudge to do the right thing, and I'm not sure about Dumbledore either." Black looked puzzled at this, but Harry just nodded. "But nobody can blame you for what you did, and people need to know that Voldemort's back. So we need to figure out how to tell them."

"How?" Harry asked. We talked about it for a while, but the only reporter we knew of was Skeeter, and even if we trusted her to write the story, we didn't know how to get in touch with her. When we got to the station, we gave up on the conversation for the evening. There was a train leaving for Newcastle at 11:00, which seemed far enough away. We had plenty of time to get a bite to eat before we bought our tickets.

There was only one restaurant open in the station. The food was pretty bland, but I was suddenly starving, and I ate everything I could get my hands on. Harry was even hungrier, and I sorted through some of the money in the sack while he devoured a second order of chips. We paid the bill, and headed for the ticket counter.

I found myself in front of the other two, holding the sack. "Er, three second-class to Newcastle, please," I mumbled. I had never actually bought a train ticket by myself before.

"Forty-two pounds thirty, miss," the ticket clerk replied. He was a limp older man with thinning hair and a thinning mustache. He looked bored at first, but when I started counting out coins, he turned annoyed and suspicious. Then he caught a glimpse of Black. "May I see some identification, please?" he said.

That wasn't good. He had no reason to ask for ID, and no reason to suspect who Black was, but none of us had any ID. I pretended to fumble for my wallet, panicking on the inside, and then I heard Black whisper, "Confundo."

The clerk's face twitched a couple of times. He looked down at the floor, then up at the ceiling, then right at me. "My train!" he shrieked, so loudly that the few people in the station all looked at us. "You can't get on my train! You have to get on my train! You have to! But you can't!" I took a step back, sweeping the coins I'd laid on the counter into my hand, but he kept shouting.

"Stephen, what's wrong?" Another clerk had rushed over to the one Black had Confunded.

"My train!" he said again. "These people!" The new clerk looked at us suspiciously, but the confusion and alarm on our faces was real.

"What about these people? Why can't they get on the train?"

"It's my train, and they can't get on, but they have to!"

The new clerk shot another look at us, but this one was apologetic. "All right, Stephen," he said, taking the Confunded man by the elbow. "Maybe you should sit down in the back for a while, and I'll take care of those people." And he led him through a little door behind the counter, and out of sight.

I counted out the money while he was gone, and when he came back, he sold me the tickets in a tangle of confused apologies. "I hope he's all right," I said sincerely, and we headed for the platform as fast as we could.

Once we were safely on the platform, Harry turned to Black. "I don't think you should use that wand any more," he said.

I had to swallow a hysterical laugh, but Black looked injured. "It worked, didn't it?" he protested.

"They'll think he was drunk," I said. "He'll probably get sacked."

Black frowned, but didn't say anything. Harry looked at him sternly. "You'll probably set us on fire the next time you use it."

Black looked down. "All right," he finally said. "Only in the direst of emergencies."

The train was only a quarter full, and we had no trouble finding a private place to sit. We settled in to the hard, dirty seats that were going to be our bed for the night. Harry hadn't transfigured coats for us, and it was cool on the train, so I took the excuse to rest my head on his chest.

When we were both as comfortable as we could get, I lifted my head and whispered into Harry's ear. "All the times I imagined the first time we'd spend the night together," I told him, "this particular scenario didn't come up once." He choked, then laughed silently, and then wrapped his arm around me. It didn't take long for us to fall asleep.

* * *

I woke up stiff and sore, and much too early. The train had arrived in Newcastle about the same time as the sun, and the light had woken me up before we pulled into the station. Black didn't look like he'd slept all night, which just made his glamour look that much worse. Harry was sound asleep, and it took more than a hand on his shoulder to wake him.

He leaned hard on me as we climbed down to the platform, and I practically dragged him across the street to a grubby little restaurant. He ate like he had the night before, finishing off two whole breakfasts in the time that I ate one. Black seemed pretty hungry himself.

While we ate, we discussed our plans. Black and I did most of the talking. He wanted to get out of the city as fast as we could, and hide out somewhere while we planned our next move. I thought there was safety in crowds. A group of Aurors couldn't exactly Apparate into the city center and arrest Harry in front of a bunch of Muggles, the way I saw it. We argued the way people who don't know each other well argue, trying to be insistent without being rude, keeping our voices low so as not to be overheard.

Finally Harry dropped his fork, and we both looked up, startled. "Katie, I'm afraid you're overestimating how much wizards care about Muggles. They'll Obliviate half the city if they have too. But more to the point, I think it's possible that your parents might have reported you missing." I looked at him in sudden anguish, but rubbed his thumb reassuringly down the side of my hand. "Calling them was the right thing to do, and they think we're in London anyways. But I think it's better if we all stay out of sight as much as possible." And he picked up his fork again.

I paid with another big handful of coins; we'd definitely made a big dent in our resources. The quickest way out of town seemed to be across the river, so we found a high bridge with four whizzing lanes of traffic and headed for the south bank.

We followed the river for a while, not really having any better plan. It was still so early that, when we found a Tesco, it wasn't even open yet, but I tried to remember its location for later. Harry was practically catatonic, and Black was looking around like a wanted criminal, so when we got to a small stretch of woods, we ducked inside. It was more of an abandoned spot in the city than a proper forest, but it was deserted, and that was all we needed. We sat down under a copse of pine trees.

Harry promptly stretched out on the ground and fell asleep. Black and I exchanged a look that was half amusement, half sympathy, and sat facing each other on either side of him, so that we could see someone coming from any direction.

I didn't really know what to say to him, but he broke the ice, looking at a point beyond my left shoulder. "I don't really remember how I got to Azkaban," he said. "I was fighting with Peter, and there was a huge explosion, and then I was surrounded by Aurors. But I don't know what happened after that. I never had a trial, I'm sure about that. But I don't know if they took me to the Ministry, or some other prison, or if they just chucked me in Azkaban."

"We can't let that happen to Harry," I said.

He still wouldn't look at me. "I've let him down so many times," he said. "I should never have taken my eyes off of him. Everything would be so different."

"You're here for him now," I reassured him. "We'll get him out of this."

"You're the one with a plan," he said, and I chose to take it as a hint.

"It's not even so much a plan," I said. "It's just that, if people knew what happened, they wouldn't blame him. Not even the Death Eaters could blame him, for fighting and surviving. And he might have defeated Voldemort again."

Black finally made eye contact. "I don't really want to bring this up, but have you considered- Katie, it's possible that he didn't tell us the whole story. Especially since you're his girl, there might have been something he wanted to leave out. And I don't want him to get up there in front of everyone, doped to the gills on Veritaserum, and have him tell us that he used the Cruciatus on Peter or something."

I looked at him coolly. "First of all, I don't think that's a good example," I told him. "I don't think Harry's capable of the Cruciatus. Second, I have more faith in him than that." And I did, even though he hadn't told me about Black himself. He'd been so honorable in every situation that I couldn't believe he'd do anything less than the right thing. Black still looked worried, so I softened my stance a little. "We'll ask him, before we do anything. You can ask him when I'm not around, if you want."

"I hope you don't think I disapprove of you," he said.

Actually, his approval had never even occurred to me. And why would he disapprove, anyway? "What do you mean?" I demanded.

He looked me in the eye again. "I'm sorry," he said. "It's been twelve years since I talked to a girl, and I seem to have forgotten how. What I meant was, I think you're wonderful for Harry. It was my fondest hope that he would find a girl like you."

That was pretty good, as apologies went. "It's all right," I said. "He's a good guy, and a good boyfriend. He's had a tough time, and turned out all right anyway." He looked down, and we lapsed into silence for a moment.

"Katie," he finally said. "It's a lot easier for me as a dog sometimes. Do you mind-?"

I didn't. So I watched Harry sleep away the morning with a big black dog at my side. I didn't pet him.

* * *

It was a glowing silver bird that woke Harry up. I was still too keyed up to sleep, and my mind was churning away. Black looked more canine today, sitting like a good guard dog would. But neither of us could stop the lightning-fast bird that swooped out of the sky and landed next to Harry.

He'd barely started awake at my shout when the bird spoke in Professor Dumbledore's voice. "Mr. Potter," it said. "If you can find a way to return to us with Miss Bell, I believe I can guarantee your safety." Then it slowly dissipated into nothing.

Harry looked at me, then at Black. "What was that?" he asked. There was no trace of grogginess in his voice, and his hand was on his wand.

Black turned back into a man. I hadn't really paid attention before, but I was glad to see that his collar disappeared and his clothes reappeared as part of the transformation. "Patronus," he said. "The Order came up with a way to use them for communication."

"So that really was from Dumbledore?"

Black nodded. "Not many people know the spell, and nobody can fake it."

"Can you teach me to do it?" Harry asked. I didn't even think of asking for myself.

"Probably, but it might take some practice, and you still can't do magic here." Harry jerked his hand back from his wand when Black said that.

"Typical bloody useless Dumbledore," he said grumpily.

Black shot him a questioning look, so I jumped in. "A vague message that we can't possibly respond to? That's Dumbledore all right. What does he mean, he thinks he can guarantee your safety? From who? How?"

Black was about to protest, but Harry spoke first. "All right. I'm sorry I slept all morning, but I was pretty worn out. I think it's time for us to do something, but let's stock up on supplies first. Katie, do we have enough money left for a trip to the store?"

"We do," I confirmed, jingling the sack.

"All right, let's go get a couple of meals worth of food. Sirius, you look like you again, and I don't want you using that wand for another glamour. Do you mind staying here?" Black looked up in surprise, and so did I. I didn't even realize that his glamour had worn off, or maybe it had disappeared when he transformed.

"Harry," Black said hesitantly, "how long will you be?"

Harry seemed to realize how worried Black was, and touched the man on the shoulder. "Not long," he said. "One store, and that's it. Don't worry, Sirius."

Black didn't say anything. He just turned back into a dog, and slunk off into the woods. He laid himself down in a little depression in the ground, circling four times to arrange his body just right. By the time he was done, he was practically invisible. Harry gave him a long look, then took my hand.

* * *

We weren't gone for half an hour, and we came back with bread, meat, and cheese in a sturdy knapsack. I'd even slipped in a few apples. Black was so relieved to see us that he ate lunch as a man. He and Harry ate so ferociously that we didn't really talk about our strategy, and before lunch was over, we were interrupted by another bird.

This time it was Hedwig, making a long lazy spiral out of the sky to Harry's right shoulder. He actually laughed with joy and fed her a hunk of salami, which she refused to eat until he'd untied the scroll from her leg.

"H+K - Stay safe. Hermione." was all it said on the outside, in a hasty scrawl unlike her usual precise handwriting. Inside was a copy of the morning's Daily Prophet.

"Chaos at Tri-Wizard Finale" was the banner headline. The main picture was of Dumbledore, Madame Maxime, Karkaroff, and Moody arguing in an endless loop. Things started to get interesting when we looked at the smaller headlines. "Potter Vanishes, Returns With Slain Rival, Then Flees." "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named: Returned, Then Gone Again." "Dark Ritual Involved Many Thought Innocent Or Dead." We spread the paper out on the ground and read it on our hands and knees.

The first piece that fell into place for me was the strange behavior of Professor Moody. Apparently it wasn't Moody at all, but a Death Eater impersonating him with a potion. Moody himself had been locked in his trunk for the entire school year, which meant we'd been taught by the Death Eater. After the impostor grabbed Voldemort's wand, Dumbledore had stunned him as he was activating a portkey, which the Aurors had traced.

What they had found was the aftermath of Harry's duel with Voldemort: four stunned Death Eaters, including the father of a Slytherin in Harry's year, and the dead bodies of Voldemort and Peter Pettigrew. Harry looked up when he got to that part, confused and upset. "I don't understand," he said. "Look, it says Voldemort was killed with a cutting curse, but I never cast one. All I used was Expelliarmus and a bunch of stunners."

"Then maybe somebody else killed him," I said. "One of the Death Eaters, or maybe first Auror on the scene was a little trigger-happy.

He seemed to accept that theory, then looked down. "I might have killed Peter," he said. "I might have hit him with a stunner, and he bled to death while he was out."

Black put a hand on his shoulder. "It's no secret that I've wanted to kill Peter for a long time," he said, his voice rough. "But it's not your fault that he's dead. He cut his own hand off, and none of his friends helped him. And you used non-lethal spells."

I wrapped my arms around Harry. "He's right," I told him, and kissed him. It didn't seem to help, and I wasn't sure why.

"I wanted you to be free, Sirius," he finally said. "If they had captured Peter, they would have found out the truth, but now they never will."

"It's not so bad as all that," Sirius said. "Peter showing up at a Death Eater reunion twelve years after his heroic death does poke some holes in the official story. And even if he can't testify, I can. It's not your fault, Harry."

He was still a little down as we continued reading, especially once we got to the part about his disappearance. Whoever had written the article didn't seem very sympathetic to Harry, and implied very strongly that he had run away because he had killed Cedric. The Aurors' conclusion that Cedric had been killed with Voldemort's wand didn't seem to make any difference. The article even admitted that Fudge had no reason to order Harry's arrest, but concluded with a bunch of questions about what Harry was hiding.

We decided right away that we had to respond to this somehow. Unfortunately, we didn't have anything to write on, so I went back into town to buy a biro and a notebook. When I got back, Harry and Black were hashing out what he wanted to say. Black must have been satisfied with what Harry had told him while I was gone, since they were going ahead with my plan. I took notes, and threw in my opinion when needed, and we worked it out.

We wrote three copies of a letter, for the Daily Prophet, the Wizarding Wireless, and the Director of Magical Law Enforcement. It said that Harry wanted to get the truth out, and that he would be willing to testify before a public inquiry run by a neutral party. He was willing to testify under an oath or a potion, as long as everybody else involved would do so as well, naming Barty Crouch (the Moody impersonator), Lucius Malfoy, Cornelius Fudge, and Professor Dumbledore specifically. He said that he wouldn't come back until Minister Fudge withdrew the order to arrest him.

We debated sending an additional note to Professor Dumbledore, but we decided not to. What would we have said? We didn't trust him to lead the inquiry, and we didn't really have a response to his Patronus message. Harry did write a short note to Hermione, and then we sent Hedwig off on what must have been a long journey.

There was nothing more we could do until we got a response. But we were faced with a more immediate problem: shelter. Newcastle in June wasn't exactly balmy, and getting a room at a hotel wasn't quite so easy for two teenagers and a wanted criminal as getting a train ticket. We didn't dare risk using Black's wand- a warming charm really might have set us on fire- and mine or Harry's would bring the Aurors down on us. We didn't even dare start a fire with matches, for fear of drawing Muggle attention.

At least we were well fed, and the pine needles were soft. But it was a long, cold night. Harry and I huddled together, and Black curled up at our feet in his dog form. Once again, I told Harry that this wasn't the way I'd planned our second night together, but we were too cold for it to really be funny.

I never got more than halfway asleep, and the first ray of sunlight was enough to get me up. Harry and Black followed, and after a short discussion, Harry let Black use his wand for another glamour. We headed back into town, desperate for something to warm us up.

A hot cup of tea and a real breakfast made us feel a lot better, but we were running out of ideas. It was likely to take a day or two before we got any kind of response to Harry's offer, and none of us could face the idea of another night like the last one. We were starting to run low on money; a train back to London was already out of our budget. And we didn't dare use magic until we were ready to face the Aurors. The best that we could do was to Apparate somewhere and then run, but we had nowhere to go.

The only person we could think of who might be able to help was Hermione. If the school year had ended as planned, she had sent Hedwig from Hogwarts yesterday morning, then gotten on the Express, and been warm in her bed at her parents' house while we were freezing on the banks of the Tyne. Harry didn't have her phone number, but he knew that her parents were dentists, and where they lived.

When we finished breakfast, we headed back into Newcastle proper, looking for the public library. Black decided to stay as a man, trusting the glamour, so he could come inside with us. The brief separation from Harry the day before had just about shattered him.

The Newcastle City Library was an ugly new building, but it did have a complete set of telephone directories for the United Kingdom, and we found the number of the Grangers' dental surgery. I called them, figuring they might think it was creepy if a boy called, and convinced the receptionist to get Hermione's mum on the phone. Her mum gave me their home number, and then started asking pointed questions. I got off the phone as quickly as I could.

Harry was the one who called Hermione, although I stayed in the phone box, listening in as best I could and feeding the phone 20p coins. She had her usual torrent of questions, but our ever-lighter sack of money got Harry to make her focus. She didn't see any reason why her parents wouldn't put us up for a few days, although she thought it might be better if Black stayed a dog.

We had to work out something pretty elaborate to meet her, since we didn't want to lead the Aurors to her door. She knew her way around London, so we decided that the best place to meet was near Liverpool Street Station. There was no reason to think the Aurors (or Dumbledore, or the surviving Death Eaters) even knew we'd been there. We would Apparate to the alley behind the restaurant we'd had dinner in, just two nights earlier, and meet Hermione's car. The Underaged Magic office would notice Harry Apparating, and they'd send the Aurors to Newcastle, who would then trace the trail to our destination, so we'd only have a few minutes to find her and get out of there. But we didn't have the money for another train trip, and the thought of a nice warm guest bedroom was too tantalizing to ignore.

With that settled, we actually had some time to kill. We hung around the warm library until lunchtime, finding a quiet corner and giggling at books from the Occult section. I hadn't taken Divination, but Harry assured me that the books were even more ridiculous than Trelawney. We ate a nice lunch in the city, not quite so worried about spending nearly our last pound, and then headed back to our quiet wooded spot in the afternoon.

At 6:14 PM exactly, we linked arms, and Harry Apparated us back to London. The plan worked remarkably well. Nobody noticed us arriving, and Black turned back into a dog as soon as we were sure we were alone. We found Hermione's parents' black Mondeo right where she had said it would be. The three of us leaped into the back, and Hermione introduced us to her mum as we drove east, away from our Apparition trail and eventually out of the city.

Her mum was pleasant enough, but it was clear that she was going to need some kind of explanation. She was going to have to break through Hermione's excited chatter, though. Once Hermione had established that we were uninjured and reasonably well fed, she started trying to tell us about everything that had happened after we left, and ask Harry about what had happened to him, all at the same time.

We must have been in the car for an hour, but we didn't really get to explain ourselves very well. When we pulled into the driveway of Hermione's house, Harry was just starting to talk about Cedric, so I was holding him tightly. We piled into her house, Harry trying to hold himself together, Hermione torn between respecting his grief and extracting more information. When Hermione's mum gave a startled shriek, we ran to follow her, and when we got to the kitchen, we understood why she had. There, sitting at Hermione's kitchen table, was Professor Dumbledore.

* * *

You can't really argue with Professor Dumbledore. You can't even talk to him. I was ready to explain what we'd done and demand that he protect us from the Aurors, but he just took over the conversation in that calm, wise voice of his that I'd stopped trusting. I think the only way to change his expression would have been with an Unforgiveable.

The actual news he had for us wasn't even that bad. The Wizengamot was considering how best to respond to Harry's letter, but there was going to be some sort of public hearing on what Dumbledore called "the events surrounding the Third Task." Which was a hell of a way to refer to the murder of one of his students. The Aurors weren't even going to arrest Harry, as long as certain conditions were met.

"I'm not going back to the Dursleys." It was the first thing he'd said since he saw Dumbledore, and it did make the old man pause. "I'll stay with the Grangers if they're willing, or the Bells if they're willing, or the Burrow. But not the Dursleys." Hermione's mum looked uncomfortable, which made sense; she was actually on pretty shaky ground. We were runaways or fugitives or something, and she had no legitimate reason to have us at her house. And there was no way he could stay with me, and he probably didn't really want to stay with Ron.

But Dumbledore was shaking his head. "I'm afraid neither your family nor your friends will be acceptable hosts for our purposes." I was immediately suspicious of what those purposes were, and whose. "Your kind offer to explain your situation to the Wizengamot prompted some rather delicate negotiations." I was actually impressed; he'd gotten through that sentence without even hinting at sarcasm. But Harry's face was still grim. "It seems that the place where you will be safe from those who might not want your story told, and free of the influence of those with their own agendas, among whose number I am sadly counted, is the home of the Director of Magical Law Enforcement, Madam Bones."

Harry looked at him for a moment. I had the ridiculous thought that I didn't want him staying with Susan Bones, but there were more serious reasons why this might be a bad idea. If Madam Bones worked for Fudge, she might, in fact, not want Harry's story told. Even with all the time we'd spent talking about them, I'd never managed to figure out Dumbledore's motivations, but I couldn't really imagine that he would just turn Harry over to the Ministry without any protection. Finally, Harry asked, "What are my alternatives?"

Dumbledore looked regretful. "A Ministry holding cell, perhaps. There were many offers made, but none that I thought would satisfy you."

Hermione and I shared a glance, and I gripped my wand. I didn't really think that we could beat Dumbledore in a fair fight, but if Harry gave the signal, I was ready to make sure the fight was as unfair as possible. Harry spoke without looking away from Dumbledore. "Hermione," he said, "do we have any reason to believe that Madam Bones is a Death Eater sympathizer?"

"No," she said.

"Katie," Harry said. "I'll send Hedwig to you every day. If she doesn't show up one day, tell the Prophet I've been murdered."

"Right," I said. It stopped feeling real to me then. It wasn't a situation for joking, but I couldn't imagine that Harry was seriously planning for his own death. But it sounded like he'd made up his mind.

And in fact, he had. "All right," he told Dumbledore. "I'll stay with Madam Bones."

I was glad that Dumbledore's facial expression didn't change. If he'd looked triumphant, I might have embarrassed myself by trying to hex him. But all he said was, "Very well. I've prepared a portkey to the Bones residence. Miss Bell, may I offer you an escort back to your home?" He didn't wait for me to respond, although the hateful glare I gave him was probably all I had to offer. He just pulled out his wand and cast a messenger Patronus. Thirty seconds later there was a knock on the door, and Hermione's mum came back with a slightly sheepish Professor Lupin. That's how out of touch Dumbledore was: his idea of a good escort for a 15-year-old girl was a professor who'd been forced to resign because he was a danger to his students. But I knew Professor Lupin a little, and Harry and Black both trusted him, so I kissed Harry goodbye and let him lead me out the door. It still didn't feel real.

* * *

It turned out that Professor Lupin had a portkey back to the alley behind my building. Nobody was taking their trash out that evening, so nobody saw us arrive. I didn't have my house key with me, so I rang my own doorbell without saying a word to my escort. He took the hint and faded away, watching me without actually accompanying me.

Mum and Dad both came to the door. Mum didn't even get a word out before she started sobbing and hugging me. Dad guided us up the stairs and into our flat before he joined the hug. I felt terrible. I'd never meant to worry them, but there was nothing I would have done differently, given the choice. But it must have been really awful for them, and I hadn't called again, so they'd gone two whole days without any news. I also felt foolish. We knew it was too dangerous to go see them. What made us think that Hermione's house would be safe?

I spent that night telling them the truth. Most of it, at least. We sat at the kitchen table, Mum refilling her own tea every ten minutes, Dad with a bottle of beer that he opened, then never touched. I'm sure they were more than a little frustrated when I started by saying, "On Halloween of 1981," but they let me tell it my way. By the time I was done, it was nearly two in the morning, and we were all pretty drained. I just wanted to go to bed. They had one of those silent conversations that they knew how to have, and then Mum said, "We're not done talking about this, Katherine, but we're not going to get any further tonight. Go to bed, and we'll talk tomorrow."

I had things to sleep in left in my room from last summer, and of course Mum had put clean sheets on my old bed. I wanted sleep more than I wanted a shower, so I changed and then opened the window, only to turn around to Mum standing in my doorway. She looked at the window. "I'm not leaving," I protested. "It's just so Hedwig can get in."

She left without saying anything. I collapsed in my bed, but I could hear their voices, low and intense, for a long time after I wanted to be asleep.

* * *

_Thanks to everybody who left reviews during my long absence. In the last six months or so, I've weathered a personal crisis, moved halfway across the country with two small children, found an excellent new job, and written about five thousand words. Writing time is still hard to come by, but I'm going to finish this story._


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